PROMOTIONS TO PERSONAL CHAIRS

The Professorial and Readerships Promotions Committee have made the following promotions which are, as always, subject to the formal ratification of Senate and Council. 

Susan Bruce (English)

Originally a specialist in the English Literature of the Renaissance period, including the works of Shakespeare, Professor Bruce has also developed a strong interdisciplinary dimension to her academic work. This includes innovative work in which she compares Shakespeare's writing with twentieth century literature and reads it in the context of anthropological theories of the gift.  Her interdisciplinarity also extends to highly praised work on literature and economics, as well as a broad exploration of the interplay between literature and photography in concepts of identity and biography.

She has shown outstanding commitment to, and leadership of, teaching not only through her own practice but also as an intellectual endeavour. She has held research funding for work on pedagogical issues in the teaching of English Literature.  She has also published on this topic, as well as working nationally with the English Subject Centre.  She is widely recognised as an outstanding, rounded scholar who contributes significantly to her discipline, and to the University, in many different ways.

Coel Hellier (Astrophysics)

Coel Hellier joined Keele as a Lecturer in 1994, having trained at Oxford as a Physicist, and having developed his astronomy through a PhD and Post-Doctoral Fellowship at University College London, and then a prestigious Hubble Fellowship at the University of Texas.  His early research focused on using X-ray data to study accretion processes, such as material transferring from one star to another. 

Following his promotion to Reader in 2000 he made a change in research focus, and is leading a team that is searching for planets around other stars, having built a specialist array of optical cameras to search for tiny dips in a star's light when a planet transits in front of it.  With colleagues primarily from St. Andrew's and Queen's University (Belfast), the Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project has been the world's most successful transit-search team, having discovered more than 20 exo-planets. Their discoveries have been highly cited, and Time magazine and CNN judged the WASP exo-planets to be the sixth most important scientific discovery in 2007. Professor Hellier has been PI of seven major Research Council grants and is PI of the current £1.5m Astrophysics rolling grant and the £1.3m WASP project grant.

David Hoole (Life Sciences)

David Hoole joined Keele as a Lecturer in 1985, having trained as an Agricultural Zoologist at Leeds for his BSc, and then at Sunderland for his PhD in Parasitology and Immunology.  This area has been the focus for his research ever since, with Professor Hoole building up a strong national and international reputation in the study of fish parasites.  However, it is the interface between Parasitology, Immunology and Molecular Biology that has led to his most important research breakthroughs in the past five years, providing key insights into the effects of chemicals on stimulating or reducing the immunological response to parasitic attacks.  This area of research has substantial 'enterprise' opportunities because of the worldwide rise in fish farming for food production, and so includes commercial collaborations to address genuine problems in the industry; his expertise in the area has been recognised by his involvement in a number of government reports and approved diagnostic techniques. 

Alongside his research and enterprise, he has been highly involved in teaching innovations, especially at postgraduate level.  Most recently, the teaching/research interface has been developed through a Marie-Curie contract of €3m led by Professor Hoole, which involves partners in nine European countries, including three industries, and the research training of 16 graduate students and post-doctoral workers who will be studying the mechanisms by which immuno-stimulants increase resistance of fish to a range of economically important pathogens.

EXPERT ADVICE TO THE JUDICIAL APPOINTMENTS COMMITTEE

Professor Fiona Cownie, Law School and  the Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice, was invited, in her role as President of the Society of Legal Scholars, to offer expert advice to the Judicial Appointments Commission at its annual strategic review last week. The Commission asked Professor Cownie to advise on the question of judicial appointments as a career option for legal academics. Traditionally, it has not always been easy for legal academics to take up judicial appointments, but the Commission is working to change this. Professor Cownie was able to put forward a number of suggestions to assist the Commission with its forward planning.

MODEL OF BEST PRACTICE

A snapshot of the work carried out by the Learning Support team within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences is currently being featured as a model of best practice on the LLiDA's (Learning Literacies in a Digital Age) wiki.
 
The LLiDA wiki is a collection of learning literacies being employed in FE and HE sectors in the UK. This initiative attempts to capture how educationalists are supporting today's students in technologically driven times.

Their Keele entry is a project entitled, 'i-guides: byte-sized pockets of information' and features a series of electronic study skills and academic guidance booklets. The guides are a spin-off from K:LEarn, the faculty learning support space and study skills support network pages on the KLE. See the work here: http://system.newzapp.co.uk/GLink.asp?LID=MjAwNzY4NSw5

INTERNATIONAL ENTERPRISE DAY

Staffordshire Languages Group, participating in the HEFCE funded Routes into Languages programme, organised an International Enterprise Day in the Exhibition Suite at Keele last week. Eight local employers, amongst them Keele Conferences, worked with groups of Year 9 and 10 pupils from Stoke and Staffordshire schools to produce a short advertisement for their products or services in French, German or Spanish. The results were imaginative and captivating, acted out with a good degree of enthusiasm to the whole group and a panel of judges. Professor Susan Bruce, Head of the School of Humanities, is pictured presenting the award to a team of boys and girls from Cheslyn Hay Sports and Community High School who had produced an advertisement for EON UK.

SCIENCE FOR SUSTAINABILITY SHORTLISTED FOR NATIONAL AWARD

The Science for Sustainability group at Keele (Professor Mark Ormerod, Dr Zoe Robinson and Lucy Gallagher, School of Physical and Geographical Sciences) was among those shortlisted at the prestigious Sustain Magazine Awards for Sustainability, Business and the Built Environment in the Communication category for their highly original and innovative work in developing effective strategies and approaches  in communicating climate change, sustainable energy approaches and sustainable living to schoolchildren, school teachers and the wider public over the last two years.  

They were up against some big names at a presentation ceremony in London last week and the award went to IFAW for their 'Adopt a Humpback' project.  Jim McClelland, Founder and Editor of Sustain magazine said: 'The calibre of the shortlist represent the benchmark for achievement in Sustainability, (Business and the Built Environment), setting a standard for their peers to match'.  

For more information about the Science for Sustainability project, visit http://system.newzapp.co.uk/GLink.asp?LID=MjAwNzY4Niw5.

KEELE SCIENTIST INVITED BY THE ROYAL SOCIETY TO PRESENT AT THE NATIONAL 'LABS TO RICHES' EVENT

Dr Nigel Cassidy, of the Research Institute for Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics and the School of Physical and Geographical Sciences, has been invited by The Royal Society to exhibit his latest research at their prestigious 'Labs to riches' event.   As part of the Industrial Fellows' Day, the London-based event is the Society's national showcase for industrial-related research and is attended by a diverse audience of leading industrialists, financiers and academics.

Dr Cassidy, who is a Royal Society Industrial fellow in partnership with Fugro-Aperio, will be demonstrating the development and application of a novel, high-resolution 'in pipe' ground-penetrating radar system for the inspection and characterisation of underground cable ducts, sewers and boreholes.

Dr Cassidy said, "It is an honour and a pleasure to be invited to such an event.  This is a unique opportunity for me to promote the sort of practical research we are very good at doing at Keele.  I'm delighted to be involved."

OBSERVING TIME ON SPACE BASED OBSERVATORY

Dr James Reeves, an RCUK Fellow in the Astrophysics Group at Keele, has successfully won observing time on the Suzaku X-ray observatory. Suzaku is a space based observatory, run by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), to study hot cosmic plasmas. Dr Reeves won 130 kiloseconds (36 hours) of observing time to study the energetic wind produced by the distant quasar, MR 2251-178, which contains a supermassive black hole 100 million times more massive than the Sun. The project was ranked the highest by ESA of all the European proposals that were reviewed in 2009.

RESEARCH GRANT

Dr Stefan Krause, Research Institute for the Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics, has received a Royal Society International Travel Grant of £1,980 to attend the 8th International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) Scientific Assembly in Hyderabad, India in September.

ENHANCING THE USE OF E-LEARNING RESOURCES

The Annual e-Learning Workshop, held at Keele Hall, was a combined local and national conference on "Enhancing and Extending the Use of eLearning Resources: Bringing a Content Repository and VLE Closer". It reported on the HE Academy funded Pathfinder project led by Tim Denning, Learning Development Unit, to develop a learning resources repository at Keele and the workflows to allow easy use by academics. The presentations are available here. Training in the use of the repository will become available before 2009-10.

POETRY LIVE!

Peter Didsbury gave a reading this week in Keele's current Poetry Live! programme. He teaches writing at Hull University and won the Forward Prize in 2005 for the collection from which he read.  Much of Peter Didsbury's writing refers to his long experience as a professional archaeologist and his family associations with Hull. 

The reading was both relaxed and engaging, reflecting Peter Didsbury's assured low-key confidence. It was greatly appreciated by his audience of Keele students and members of the public.

The next reading in the series is David Harsent on Tuesday, 31 March.