In this seminar, Charlotte and Liz will talk through the process of designing, implementing and evaluating the Talking about School Transition 5-7 curriculum. TaST 5-7 is a universal, class-based intervention aimed to improve children’s emotional wellbeing over the transition from primary school to secondary school. TaST 5-7 does this by developing children’s awareness, knowledge and ability to cope with the multiple changes they will experience over primary-secondary school transition, through an established transition curriculum. 

This skills based curriculum was informed by theory (MMT Theory; Jindal-Snape, 2023); prior empirical research, including the design and evaluation of Dr Charlotte Bagnall’s Talking about School Transition (TaST) intervention, which has been referenced in recent NICE and Health Policy Scotland guidelines as a “promising school-based intervention” following Charlotte’s 2020 research; in addition to Transition 5-7designed by Liz Stevenson’s 18 years first-hand experience supporting school transition within Sandwell. TaST 5-7 is currently being evaluated, alongside the design and validation of their P-S WELLS scale development research study, which we will discuss in the seminar.

Speakers

Dr Charlotte Bagnall is a Lecturer at the University of Manchester within Manchester’s Institute of Education. Charlotte is an applied social psychologist, with a particular interest in intervention science and co-creation within education. She is currently the Principle Investigator of the funded P-S WELLS research project and TaST 5-6 intervention evaluation research project, which she will talk about within the seminar.

Liz Stevenson is a teaching and learning consultant with a focus on transition between Key Stage 2 and 3. She has 25 years experience as a teacher and leader in both primary and secondary schools. She has worked as the Transition Manager for a Local Authority in the West Midlands and also currently works in School Improvement for Birmingham Education Partnership. 

Calum MacGillivray and Fahd Ali Asif are doctoral students in the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, at the University of Dundee. Calum is in his first year of full time PhD studies, whereas Fahd is in the fourth year of his part time professional doctorate. They are both undertaking transitions research.

They have experienced several educational and life transitions as a result of starting on their doctoral journeys. They will discuss these as part of the TCELT Transitions Community Compass, as well as providing opportunities to others to ask them questions and share their own experiences. They will finish off with a discussion of strategies that may support other doctoral students and their supervisors, but also the wider community whom doctoral students meet on a day-to-day basis.

Please join us for a fascinating conversation with two researchers who are undertaking transitions research as well as discussing their own (and significant other’s) transitions!

Presenter Professor Werner De Bondt (DePaul University, Chicago, US)

Hosts: Prof. Morris Altman

The School is pleased to announce our next Ronald Coase Lecture, which will be delivered by Professor Werner De Bondt (DePaul University, Chicago, US). The topic of Professor De Bondt's lecture will be on investments, with an emphasis on both the strengths and weaknesses of financial decision-making. This lecture will be open to all academics, students and the general public.

Professor De Bondt studies the rationality and irrationality of investors, markets, and organizations. He has investigated key research questions such as the intuitive tendency of naïve investors to extrapolate past trends in stock prices and corporate earnings, market overreaction, bubbles, the excessive self-confidence of traders, and their herding instinct. Key facts:

• One of the founders of the field of behavioural finance.
• 3,357 citations of his paper in the Journal of Finance “Does the Stock Market Overreact?”. Co-author – Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler.
• Frequent speaker to academics and investment professionals around the world.
• Numerous academic articles (among others, in the Journal of Finance, the Financial Analysts Journal, the European Economic Review, and the American Economic Review).

Teams link: Join the meeting now

Presenter Professor Werner De Bondt (DePaul University, Chicago, US)

Hosts: Dr. Stavros Kourtzidis and Dr. Egor Kiselev

Professor De Bondt studies the rationality and irrationality of investors, markets, and organizations. He has investigated key research questions such as the intuitive tendency of naïve investors to extrapolate past trends in stock prices and corporate earnings, market overreaction, bubbles, the excessive self-confidence of traders, and their herding instinct. 

Key facts:

• One of the founders of the field of behavioural finance.
• 3,357 citations of his paper in the Journal of Finance “Does the Stock Market Overreact?”. Co-author – Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler.
• Frequent speaker to academics and investment professionals around the world.
• Numerous academic articles (among others, in the Journal of Finance, the Financial Analysts Journal, the European Economic Review, and the American Economic Review).

This is a technical talk for early-career researchers, PhD students, and graduate students.

Teams link: Join the meeting now 

Presenter Professor Werner De Bondt (DePaul University, Chicago, US)

Hosts: Dr. Stavros Kourtzidis and Dr. Egor Kiselev

Professor De Bondt studies the rationality and irrationality of investors, markets, and organizations. He has investigated key research questions such as the intuitive tendency of naïve investors to extrapolate past trends in stock prices and corporate earnings, market overreaction, bubbles, the excessive self-confidence of traders, and their herding instinct. 

Key facts:

• One of the founders of the field of behavioural finance.
• 3,357 citations of his paper in the Journal of Finance “Does the Stock Market Overreact?”. Co-author – Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler.
• Frequent speaker to academics and investment professionals around the world.
• Numerous academic articles (among others, in the Journal of Finance, the Financial Analysts Journal, the European Economic Review, and the American Economic Review).

We study the size and winner-loser effects in U.S. stock returns. Both effects are present in U.S. data between 1931 and 2021, and after the 1980s, but both effects also vanish after merely 2% of extremely large positive or large negative returns are removed. Our analysis invites a more refined interpretation of return anomalies, risk factors, and their investment management implications.

Teams link: Join the meeting now 

Host: Prof. Rastko Sknepnek 

Venue:  Sir Kenneth & Lady Noreen Murray Seminar Room, CITR 284

Abstract 

Counting RNA and protein molecules serves to identify cell state and its function, yet rarely this information is utilized to infer the underlying dynamical processes that produced the data. In this talk, I will present my long-term efforts to understand the dynamics of gene expression through the integration of mechanistic models with diverse count datasets. Starting with mRNA translation, I will present a computational framework designed to infer the dynamics of protein synthesis from polysome and ribosome profiling data [1]. Transitioning to RNA transcription, I will demonstrate the efficacy of employing queueing theory to effortlessly solve numerous stochastic gene expression models [2,3,4], allowing for fast and accurate inference of kinetic parameters from RNA count data [5]. 

1.  J. Szavits-Nossan and L. Ciandrini, Inferring efficiency of translation initiation and elongation from ribosome profiling, Nucleic Acids Research 48(17), 9478-9490 (2020) 
2.  J. Szavits-Nossan and R. Grima, Steady-state distributions of nascent RNA for general initiation mechanisms, Phys. Rev. Research 5, 013064 (2023) 
3.  A. G. Nicoll, J. Szavits-Nossan, M. R. Evans, R. Grima, Transient power-law behaviour following induction distinguishes between competing models of stochastic gene expression, 
   biorxiv:2023.12.30.573521 (2023) 
4.  J. Szavits-Nossan and R. Grima, Solving stochastic gene expression models using queueing theory: a tutorial review, Biophysical Journal 123(9), 1034-1057 (2024) 
5. Y. Wang, J. Szavits-Nossan, Z. Cao and R. Grima, Joint distribution of nuclear and cytoplasmic mRNA levels in stochastic models of gene expression: analytical results and parameter inference, bioRxiv 2024.04.29.591679 (2024)

The Complete University Guide 2026 places Dundee as the top destination for Dentistry once again, and second in the UK for Forensic Science. Other subjects in the national top ten include Medicine and Pharmacology & Pharmacy.

The University also ranked 19th in the UK and second in Scotland for graduate employability, a 16-place climb.

These successes have contributed to a significant rise for the University in the overall Complete University Guide 2026, with Dundee now placed at 39 in the UK, a 12-place rise from 2025.

Hosts: Piers Hemsley, Tony Ly & Geoffrey Barton

Venue: MSI Small Lecture Theatre, SLS

Abstract: Post-translational modifications (PTMs) play a key role in most biological functions, and are often implicated in disease. Mass spectrometry (MS) coupled with database searching are commonly used to detect and localise modification sites on proteins, and many PTM-enriched, raw MS datasets are deposited in the public domain via ProteomeXchange.

In our group, we have previously profiled PTM-containing databases that lacked an evidence trail or robust statistics on site detection, demonstrating a high reporting of false positive PTM sites. We established the PTMeXchange project (Liverpool, EMBL-EBI, Institute of Systems Biology, USA) aimed at re-analysing publicly available, enriched PTM datasets, focusing on accurate PTM localisation and data sharing.

We have developed new statistical approaches for controlling the global false discovery rate in site detection, and for performing PTM meta-analyses. Our consortium has also developed new infrastructure, such as the Universal Spectrum Identifier, to capture and visualise a full evidence trail, and a data dissemination pipeline, enabling results to be visualised and accessible in protein knowledgebases, like UniProtKB, as well as in proteomics-specific resources – PRIDE and PeptideAtlas, thus making PTM data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable).

In this talk, I will describe the PTM analysis methods and infrastructure, as well as the results for species-phosphorylation builds, particularly focussed on rice and the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, and briefly mention others e.g. Yeast, human and mouse. We also have on-going builds in production for lysine modifications in humans (SUMO, ubiquitin and acetylation).

For PTM builds, we explore PTM motifs and associated biological pathways, their conservation within or across species, and map to structural features (AlphaFold models and protein disorder predictions) to understand the function and evolution of PTMs.

Our team is also working on annotating the rice pan-genome, and contributes to the eukaryotic pathogen and vector database https://veupathdb.org which has popular component sites such as PlasmoDB, FungiDB and TriTrypDB (kinetoplastids), which I will mention briefly.

 

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Joint Top in the UK for Graduate Prospects in Medicine

Host: Henry McSorley

Venue: Sir Kenneth & Lady Noreen Murray Seminar Room, CTIR 2.84

Abstract 

I completed my undergraduate studies in chemistry at University College Dublin and subsequently undertook a PhD in medicinal chemistry at Trinity College Dublin. After a period in industry, I carried out postdoctoral work at Northwestern University, Chicago and at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford. I subsequently moved to the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London in 2014 and joined the academic staff in 2016. In 2023 I was appointed as a Full Professor of Respiratory Immunology at UCD, a Conway Institute Senior Fellow and a Senior Fellow at Imperial College London. My laboratory explores molecular mechanisms that dictate innate immune responses in the lung during chronic lung diseases (such as asthma and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis).