MyGlasgow News

EPSRC photography prize for School of Engineering research assistant

Finlay Walton, a research assistant in the School of Engineering, has won a category of the annual photo competition run by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council. 

He came first in the "Eureka and Discovery" section for "The mysterious and colourful second crystal. A polarisation microscope was used to capture the moment a new crystal form was discovered alongside a known crystal.

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Car parking charges - correction 

MyGlasgow News last week included an update on the car parking permit charges to be introduced next year.  It was wrongly stated that charges at Garscube were rising to £260 p.a. when in fact it should have stated that the current charge of £200 is rising to £210.

Permit holders should also note that the Lilybank car park is available only to Gilmorehill standard permit holders. Garscube permit holders are not permitted to park there and if they do so they may be subject to a parking charge notice from Glasgow City Council.

UofG receives HR Excellence in Research Award

The University has been awarded the European Commission HR Excellence in Research Award in recognition of our strong commitment to the career development of researchers. The award is based on the submission of a gap analysis and plan which highlights key actions relating to recruitment and employment conditions, the research environment and culture, and professional and career development support for researchers and PIs.

An important feature of the award process is consultation with research-only staff, which is undertaken primarily through our Postdoctoral Researcher Forum, as well as local meetings and events, staff surveys and the annual Research Staff Conference, which is attended by over 100 research-only staff each year.

The EC reviewers commented positively on our submission:

The University of Glasgow provided an excellent application. Progress is evident and the new Action Plan is ambitious for going further.

In particular, the award submission demonstrated how our efforts to support early career researchers align with other ongoing initiatives, such as Athena Swan and work relating to Research Integrity. A strong feature of our action plan is our support for researchers to explore non-academic career opportunities. In recent years, this has expanded to include postdoc entrepreneurship training and regular informal careers lunches and networking opportunities.

Full documentation on our European Commission submission can be found here: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/ris/researcherdevelopment/ecrstrategy/hrexcellence/ and contact  Elizabeth.Adams@glasgow.ac.uk with any questions.

WCGT Service Design Day

June 1 was Service Design Day. The theme this year was about giving back to the community. Service Designers shared tips, tools and methods on the work and project they are doing to benefit their communities.

Q: What is Service Design?
A: Service Design is a process used to develop new services and service concepts or to improve current services. It considers this holistically: with the people who use the service as well as those who are providing it at the centre of all service design.

WCGT (World-Changing Glasgow Transformation) employs a range of service design tools and methods across our projects. This year we have enjoyed collaborating with the University community to learn about your experiences and how we can work together to design our services.

Working with colleagues in Information Services and Student and Academic Services to blueprint a new ‘Reach Out’ student frontline service enabled us to co-create a service that focusses on providing information and support to students when and where they need it.

During our user research for our Professional Services project we have been able to engage with students and staff across the Institution to find out more about what enables you to work effectively and what areas could be improved.

We are grateful to everyone for the time and feedback you have shared with us this year – thank you! We want to continue our conversations and your participation is critical. 

If you would like to find out more about Service Design, what we are working on now or in the future we would welcome hearing from you. Please do get in touch with Jennifer Robertson, Head of Service Design. We are also always keen to hear from staff and students who want to get involved, so please email us to register your interest.

The Civic University and City - part of the Policy Scotland public lecture series

Explore the challenges of building bridges between place, higher education and research and innovation policy in this public lecture.

Professor John Goddard OBE, Vice Chair of the Civic University Commission, will discuss the Commission’s findings and its proposals for Civic University Agreements between universities and their local partners - a commitment that the University of Glasgow has adopted.

Professor Goddard is an Emeritus Professor of Regional Development Studies and a former Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Newcastle. He will draw on his publications on The University and the City (an outside-in perspective) and The Civic University: the Policy and Leadership Challenges (an inside-out perspective).

The discussion will be set in the context of the implications of the growing marketization of higher education and what this means for the role of universities as 'anchor institutions' in meeting the needs of 'left-behind places'.

This free event takes place on Monday 10 June 2019 at 2pm in the Wolfson Medical Building at the University of Glasgow, followed by a chance to chat over tea and coffee.

Please reserve your place on BookItBee

Professor Daniel Hamermesh discusses "How We Use Time, and Why" - Adam Smith Distinguished Speaker Series

Adam Smith Business School / Event

Adam Smith Distinguished Speaker Series

Professor Daniel Hamermesh

How We Use Time, and Why

Thursday 6 June 2019

Room 201 Flat Hall, John McIntyre Building, University Avenue

5pm to 6pm with a drinks reception afterwards

Using data from the US, France, Germany and the UK, Professor Hamermesh examines how time is divided among various activities, including sleep and television-watching.

He discusses how these uses differ among demographic groups and studies the effects of economic incentives such as income and wage rates. He examines how time zones affect our spending of time and demonstrates how the stress people feel about time is affected by their economic circumstances.

He also considers how changes in economic policy can lead people to alter their activities in order to generate a less stressful life in which time is balanced more evenly over their lives.

For further information, click here.

Defence and Security Accelerator collaboration

Professor Muhammad Imran and Dr Francesco Fioranelli, from the Communication Sensing & Imaging research group at the School of Engineering, have been working with Blue Bear Systems Research ltd, a company based in Bedford, on a Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) project under their Invisible Battlespace call.

Blue Bear is a world leader in innovative unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) research and development for defence. The company’s expertise in small UAS, precision flight control, autonomy, multivehicle mission management, adaptable communications and rapid prototyping of aerial platforms has seen it win major awards including the MoD Grand Challenge (2009) and an IET Innovation Award, as well as major defence UAS technology demonstrator contracts in the US and Europe.

Blue Bear is specialised in the provision of a fractionated system of UAVs, essentially a swarm of cooperating drones that can be customised with desired payloads (for example cameras and other different sensors) and controlled as a single entity to achieve specific missions. Professor Imran and Dr Fioranelli are collaborating with the company on a project aiming to realise a proof of concept fractionated system that can provide radio frequency (RF) spectrum usage awareness and mapping in the defence context.

It is extremely important to be able to identify what spectral emitters are present in a certain area of the battlefield, how they behave, at what frequency they are transmitting and with what waveforms, if they are mobile or fixed. Knowing these spectral signatures can help identify the emitters as friends, neutral, or foes, a key capability in the defence context. The fractionated capability of achieving this with a swarm of drones, one of the core IP of Blue Bear, provides the advantage of resilience and flexibility with respect to solutions that use a single platform for spectral sensing.

The Communication Sensing & Imaging research group are supporting the project with expertise in spectral sensing, both in terms of suitable hardware and algorithms. However, the team envisage a much stronger partnership in all the aspects of inter-communication, self-organisation, RF and radar sensing among all the platforms of the fractionated system.

Soapbox Science on 8 June

On Saturday, 8 June, 2019, Dr Catarina Marques from the Wellcome Centre For Integrative Parasitology and Michelle Jamieson from The School of Social and Political Sciences will join female researchers from across Scotland on their soapboxes on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, to share their passion for science with the public.

Soapbox Science was set up bring science to public spaces. Members of the public will have the opportunity to find out more about world-leading research, to ask questions, heckle and be inspired by our remarkable women in science.

Soapbox Science was commended by the Prime Minister in 2015, and was awarded a Silver Medal from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in June 2016.

The speakers will be armed only with a soapbox and a white coat – there’s no speaker, no blackboard, and definitely no powerpoint!

Come along to the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, near the City Chambers from 11am to 2pm to find out more.

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First published: 31 May 2019