By Martin Gleghorn, Repository Coordinator

One of our favourite parts of the job is getting to shout about the amazing research we see Durham academics doing, so we thought we’d have a look back at some of our highlights from the past year from our Twitter account – give us a follow @DRODurham. Some of these articles were published during 2022; others we were able to make fully available in DRO for the first time; some we just felt were particularly interesting and relevant to what was going on in the world that day…

As part of our recent Open Access Week celebrations, Beyza Ustun, a final year PhD student from Durham’s Psychology Department, kindly spared time to discuss her recent research with the Open Research Team. Beyza’s PhD research focuses on the effects of prenatal flavour exposure on fetal and infant behaviours.

Your recent piece of research ‘Flavor sensing in Utero and Emerging Discriminative Behaviors in the Human Fetus’, has recently gained a lot of attention on the news, blogs, and social media. How would you summarise this piece of research in a nutshell?

We have shown the first direct evidence that babies react differently to various smells and tastes while in the womb by looking at their facial expressions. We found that the “laughter-face” facial reaction was significantly more often seen when exposed to carrot and the “cry-face” reaction when exposed to kale. This shows that fetuses in the last 3 months of pregnancy are mature enough to distinguish different flavours transferred from the maternal diet.

On Monday 17^th October, Nayanika Mookherjee, Anthropology met with Kelly Hetherington, Repository Officer, to talk about her research – shortly before heading to India for a research trip.  She talks to us in detail about her research and some of the Open Access Publications that have resulted… including an Open Access graphic novel and film.

By Kelly Hetherington, Repository Officer at University Library and Collections.

On Wednesday 11 May, the University Library and Collections Learning and Engagement Team invited staff from the rest of our vast department to come and learn about what they do on their team.

Seeing as my role involves so much computer work, I jumped at the chance to have a trip out for the following reasons:

• The session was held at the Oriental Museum – a lovely change of scene from home working / Bill Bryson Library office because it is full of fascinating artefacts.
• Our colleagues there regularly hold sessions for school children.  This means they are fun, engaging, and lovely so I knew the session would be interesting and I’d learn something new.
• This was a session about ‘object centred engagement’ – we’d be able to touch real life old artefacts! (More on this later).

Every month, statistics about Durham Research Online (DRO) – our institutional publications repository – are published here. As part of this, we pick a publication of the month.

In November, there was an online talk given by members of the Department of Psychology’s Centre for Neurodiversity and Development about their project: Triple-A: Attention, Arousal and Anxiety in the classroom. The project draws attention to the fact that classrooms are busy, noisy and multi-sensory places and some children, often those who are ‘neurodivergent’ (e.g. have conditions such as autism), can face difficulties in this environment. The project is dedicated to raising awareness of these difficulties and helping develop tools to support children and educators. The talk was recorded and is available here. To celebrate the public talk, we picked a fully open access article, related to the research:

Distraction, distress and diversity : exploring the impact of sensory processing differences on learning and school life for pupils with autism spectrum disorders by Elizabeth K. Jones, Mary Hanley and Deborah M. Riby