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Work in Progress After a couple of
years off to start a family, Jacinta is now back to work. She spent three
highly enjoyable months at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics in the National
University of Singapore in Winter 2009-2010 and managed to swelter through an
untimely heat wave in Singapore and missed the worst UK winter in the last 30
years! She is broadening her research field and now has two exciting projects
just starting and another in prospect very soon. As she moved to
South Wales 3 years ago, Jacinta has now said a sad farewell to Ethox at the
University of Oxford, and is now based at the Department of Philosophy, Law
and Humanities in the School of Health and Human Sciences at Swansea University,
which is located in a campus next to a beautiful coastline. Although really
different from Oxford, Swansea is a very supportive and vibrant environment
in which to do ethics research. To read more about Swansea University, click
here: http://www.swan.ac.uk/ Ethical
aspects of the impact of eating disorders on female elite gymnasts This is an Economic and Social Research
Council Small Project Grant which will run from 1st June 2010 to 30th November
2011. Jacinta is joint project leader with Michael McNamee, Professor of
Applied Ethics and an expert in the ethics of sport. This project is
explained below: When London hosts the Olympics in 2012,
there will be intense public interest in British athletes taking part, and
equally intense pressure on them and their support team to win medals. Among
the risks that elite sports participation brings is a susceptibility to
eating disorders, which arise more frequently in elite athletes than the general
population. In activities like gymnastics, with its emphasis on slimness and
low bodyweight, vulnerability to these conditions is amplified.
All eating disorders can have serious physical and psychological
consequences. The implications of having an eating disorder for elite
gymnasts relate to the freedom to choose lifestyles and the development of
their identity, values and relationships. It is not known how much of a problem
eating disorders are amongst elite gymnasts in the UK. Professor Michael McNamee
and Dr Jacinta Tan will lead researchers from Swansea University in
partnership with British Gymnastics, to continue to promote welfare of elite
gymnasts by exploring these issues. They will combine social science methods
with theory from the fields of psychiatry and philosophy to study eating
disorders in elite gymnastics and make recommendations regarding policies to
improve the welfare of elite gymnasts while trying to achieve their athletic
potential. This news can also been viewed on the ESRC website:
http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/esrcinfocentre/viewawardpage.aspx?awardnumber=RES-000-22-4021 Paediatric European Risperidone Studies (PERS) This is a big,
multi-country, multicentre clinical research trial, funded by a European
Commission Seventh Framework Programme Small to Medium-scale Focused Research
Project Grant running from 1st May 2010 to 30th April 2014. Jacinta is a named
and profiled research team member involved in Work Package 7 Ethics of this
very large 5.6 million Euro project. The Ethics work package is based at
project consortium partner institution the University of Ulm, Germany, under
leadership of Professor Joerg Fegert, but Jacinta will be doing her work from
Swansea University. The Ethics research in the work package will look at
whether children and adolescents who take part in a psychiatric drug
research, and their parents, are able to give consent. It will also look at
the views of research ethics committee chairmen and the researchers of the
ethical issues involved in this kind of research. Finally, the research will
look at the experiences of the children, adolescents and their parents in
taking part in such research. This project is
about the ethics of research in young people in mental health, which is a new
area of interest. To read more about this in general, click here http://www.psychiatricethics.org.uk/ethicsofresearch.htm Watch this space
for future developments and projects! |
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Copyright 2008 Jacinta Tan
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