GSEJ founding members, Dr Jennifer Leigh and Professor Martin Michaelis were both awarded in the University of Kent’s 2022 Research and Innovation Prizes.
Dr. Jennifer Leigh was highly commended in the ‘Consolidator Research’ category for her research on embodied experience. This includes how innovative and creative research methods can add depth, richness, honesty, and emotion, and facilitate reflection into lived experiences in different contexts. She is interested in the boundaries between research, therapy, art and science. She explores intersectional experiences of marginalisation due to factors such as gender and ableism, and leads research for the International Women in Supramolecular Chemistry.
Dr. Leigh has also just been awarded the Division of Law, Society and Social Justice’s Pump Priming Fund as the principal investigator for the project, ‘Communicating health messages with and to Gen Z’. She will lead the collaboration with KMTV and secondary schools in south east England to explore how health messages can be reconceptualized, crafted, and delivered to reach young people to increase adherence to health messages.
Professor Martin Michaelis was highly commended in the ‘Advanced Research’ category. The research of Professor Michaelis is focused on the identification and investigation of drugs and their mechanisms of action. The primary interest lies on acquired drug resistance in cancer. In collaboration with Professor Jindrich Cinatl (Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main), he manages and develops the Resistant Cancer Cell Line (RCCL) Collection, a unique collection of >1,300 cancer cell lines with acquired resistance to anti-cancer drugs. In addition, Professor Michaelis is interested in virulence mechanisms and therapeutic targets in viruses and in meta-research that investigates research practices in the life sciences. His recent work has focused on Covid-19, and he has provided expert media commentary on vaccines and other treatments, variants and restrictions. His expertise on Covid-19 has seen him feature in a range of news outlets including The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, BBC Radio Kent, Daily Mirror and The Sunday Telegraph.
Both Dr Leigh and Professor Michaelis will be key contributors to our Augmented Agency∝Augmented Fairness forum this coming April.