Spotlight on Success: July 2020
Friday, 03 July 2020
Each month we publish a selection of key Teaching & Learning and Research achievements and developments. See July’s news below.
Awards & Prizes
PhD researcher of the Year 2020 has been awarded to Oliver Wilson (Geography & Environmental Sciences). Oliver's research is assessing the resilience of Brazil's iconic Araucaria forests to past and future climate change. In September 2019 he wrote an article on his research for The Conversation.
The winners for the other Themes were:
- Faye Bird (Law/Prosperity & Resilience Theme) for her work on: Sexual Violence under the Islamic State: Troubling Feminism, the UN Security Council and International Law.
- Adetunjib Adekanmbi (Geography and Environmental Science/Environment Theme) for his PhD research on: Impact of Climate Change on Soil Respiration and Resilience.
- Laura Burgess (Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences/Agriculture, Food and Health Research Theme) for her work on: Motivation contagion at school: Do friends show similar motivation in behaviour and brain?
Professor Keith Shine (Meteorology) has been awarded the Royal Meteorological Society's Mason Gold Medal which recognises his contributions to our fundamental understanding of the climate system and his ground-breaking research.
Dr Helen Dacre (Meteorology) has been awarded the Royal Meteorological Society's FitzRoy Prize for her leading research on volcanic ash clouds, enabling a more nuanced and flexible approach to assessing the risk to aviation. Dr Dacre has recently extended the forecast data to the problem of Chilean wildfire prediction.
Strategic Project Updates
Three Innovative Training Networks (ITNs) involving the University have been awarded European Commission funding. They will investigate global issues while providing training opportunities for early stage researchers hosted at Reading. The projects - Critical Earth, RE-DWELL and TRANSIT - will respectively investigate how complex maths can be used to predict and avoid damaging climate change; how housing, as a major contributor to climate change, can be made truly ‘affordable' in environmental, social and economic terms; and how technology can be better used to ensure food is safe to eat.
News:
- Graduate Outcomes first release data is now available for colleagues to access. The Graduate Outcomes survey, run by HESA and previously known as the Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE), aims to gain insight into the perspectives and destinations of graduates across the UK. Of our 2017/2018 League Table Cohort (UK Domiciled, Full-time, first degree), 94.4% are in work or further study 15 months after the end of their course, with 78.3% of those in Graduate level work. During the most recent DHLE survey taken at 6 months out (2016/2017 Academic Year), these figures were 94.2% and 75.6% respectively.
- The Reading Internship Scheme (RIS) has become more diversified than ever to become almost entirely a remote scheme, to ensure we continue to benefit our students and local businesses. Careers have made sure as many internships as possible could be converted from traditional internships into remote internships, with great success and the University is also now able to offer 100% funding for the salary of our RIS interns for both charities and SMEs, to show our support for the local business community.
- Rob Hosfield (Archaeology) has published an Open Access monograph on The Earliest Europeans. The book will be available to download shortly.
- Mara Oliva (History) has been awarded a BISA research impact grant and a US Embassy research grant for her project on women and BAME women in US foreign policy.
- Richard Iestyn Woolway will be the next NERC Independent Research Fellow to join the University this autumn, after successfully competing for this prestigious early-career opportunity. He will join the Department of Meteorology for five years to pursue research into extreme weather and seasons and the impact of such events on the biodiversity and functioning of lakes.
- Two British Academy Fellows - Dr Yasmine Shamma (English Literature) and Dr Vaibhav Singh (Typography & Graphic Communication) - took part in the British Academy's virtual showcase on 19 and 20 June. Talks, performances and demonstrations on a variety of humanities and social sciences topics were hosted on YouTube. Yasmine read from her poems about displacement, inspired by interviews with people living in refugee camps. While Dr Vaibhav Singh, Typography and Graphic Communication, used vintage typewriters to reveal how ideas and practices from 150 years ago continue to shape our writing today.
- Following a successful call for papers, the next 17 presentations in the Reading Online Sport Economics Seminars (ROSES) have been announced. The well-attended online seminars are organised by James Reade (Economics), Carl Singleton (Economics) and Adrian Bell (Henley Business School), part of the Football Research Group at the University of Reading. The series began on 27 Marchand will run until at least 18 September 2020.
Click here to see all recent University of Reading research publications.