We have four main areas of research:
- Epidemiology and Public Health
- Primary Care
- Psychiatry
- Rehabilitation and Ageing
Please scroll down to the relevant area.
Epidemiology is a multidisciplinary field and we have a number of world-renowned professionals, including epidemiologists, statisticians, clinicians, and public health consultants, who work as a team to deliver extremely high standards of teaching and research.
Our work has involved both developed and developing populations and several of our students are from overseas. Some conduct studies within their own country and/or similar studies in the UK.
There is a wide range of expertise in the division including knowledge of the conduct and analyses of large community based studies, case-control studies, cohorts, randomized controlled trials, and meta-analysis as well as use of large datasets from general practices and other sources.
Major research topics:
- Cancer
- Gastrointestinal disease (Gastrointestinal Biomedical Research Unit)
- Infection
- Tobacco control (UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies)
- Respiratory disease (Respiratory Biomedical Research Unit)
Growing research areas:
- Haematology epidemiology/bone marrow transplantation studies
- Falls and other problems in the elderly population
- Musculoskeletal disease
- Alcohol
- Obesity
Primary Care research has particular strengths in the use and delivery of health services, especially in terms of analysis of large data sets from general practice and other sources, and the evaluation of interventions.
Our main research activities are in the following fields:
- injury prevention
- applied genetics
- clinical epidemiology
- diversity and inequalities
- medicines management
- smoking cessation
There are also opportunities to undertake supervised research into medical education, including undergraduate and postgraduate medical curriculum development and evaluation, the use of virtual learning environments, and online assessment in medical education and problem based learning. However, original proposals for any area of medical education will be considered.
The NIHR Research Design Service for the East Midlands (within the Division of Primary Care) offers supervision in research methodologies including clinical trials, multi-level modelling, case-control studies and survival analyses. Areas of research activities are health service delivery and organisation; clinical innovation, particularly in primary care; and clinical trials in primary care and dermatology.
A wide variety of research topics are available within Psychiatry, including:
Behavioural sciences: reproductive, child and adolescent mental health; health education, promotion and communication; executive control; everyday and social cognition in neuropsychiatric disorders.
Developmental psychiatry: the clarification of the causal processes involved in neurodevelopmental disorders.
Forensic mental health: the understanding, assessment, and treatment of people with personality disorders, focusing on those who offend.
General adult psychiatry: drawing together the main themes of population-based and clinical research into psychosis, dementia and mental health services research.
Psychopharmacology: human autonomic psychopharmacology; behavioural pharmacology; human neuropsychology.
Rehabilitation aims to lessen the impact of disease and disability on everyday life and to assist people in reaching their fullest potential. It is required for conditions which deteriorate just as much as for those which improve.
The focus of this multidisciplinary group is on the rehabilitation process among adults with any kind of impairment and those in later life. Our research aims to provide the evidence upon which health and social care interventions can be based, to reduce the impact of injury and disease on the lives of people with physical and learning disabilities and their families.
Current research themes include:
- stroke rehabilitation including dressing, long term care, evaluation of behavioural approaches to improve mood, and the evaluation of STEM cells to achieve functional recovery after stroke, community rehabilitation and studies related to the assessment of need
- transport and mobility - work relating to driving competence, and in promoting mobility when driving is impossible
- falls and postural stability
- vocational rehabilitation
- chronic fatigue syndrome
- rehabilitation interventions in neuromuscular disease
- organisation of services for people with long term neurological disease
- technology and equipment, including work based at the Derby Assistive Technology Evaluation Centre (ATEC)
- learning disabilities research, in particular research into systems of care and transitions between services, as well as a growing programme of research, with computer scientists, on the use of virtual environments in rehabilitation.