We are delighted to share that James Allison has been awarded two prestigious fellowships. The first is a the Faculty of Dental Surgery Research Fellowship from the Royal College of Surgeons of England. This fellowship allows clinical trainees to obtain research training by covering salary, on-costs and research consumables, and will fund the first year of James’s PhD. James’ second fellowship, which will fund years two and three of James’s PhD, is a Wellcome Clinical Research Training Fellowship from the Wellcome 4ward North Clinical PhD programme—an exceptional programme led by four of the UK’s top universities: The Universities of Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, and Sheffield.
James’s PhD will look at the dispersion of viruses and other pathogens in the aerosols produced during healthcare procedures, using dentistry as a model. James will be based at Newcastle University, and will work with his supervisors and collaborators in the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and Northumbria, as well as the UK’s national measurement institute—the National Physical Laboratory. This work aims to understand how infection might be transmitted in tiny water droplets during procedures like drilling and scaling teeth, and how this can be controlled in the future.