MAJOR FUNDING FOR KEELE IN GEOTHERMAL COMPETITION

A geothermal project at Keele has been awarded major funding from the Government's Deep Geothermal Challenge Fund's second round.

The fund was set up to help organisations carry out exploratory work needed to find viable sites for this technology and Keele has been allocated £500,000 to drill a 1200m borehole to provide geothermal heat for the proposed sustainable campus.

Professor Pat Bailey, Dean of Natural Sciences, pictured, said: "The DECC funding provides crucial support for setting up geothermal energy delivery to the Keele campus, as part of the ambitious plans to reduce dramatically our carbon footprint over the next five years.

"Out of 12 applications, Keele was one of only three successful bids to the Deep Geothermal Energy fund, winning the largest grant (£0.5M) from DECC. With the opening of the Sustainability Hub Building in the summer (the Home Farm refurbishment), and the new recycling scheme launched a couple of months ago, Keele is really demonstrating its commitment to become a 'deep green' campus."

Deep geothermal energy uses the natural heat found kilometres underground to produce electricity and heat at the surface. Geothermal energy is non-intermittent, low-carbon, renewable and could be a valuable technology in diversifying the UK's energy mix and reducing the UK's dependence on imported fuels.

KEELE TEACHER TRAINING COLLABORATION IN INDIA

The Indus Training and Research Institute (ITARI), Bangalore, India, has announced a collaboration with Keele to launch a teacher training programme, leading to a Professional Graduate Diploma in International Education.

Pro Vice-Chancellor, Kevin Mattinson, said: "This is our first collaborative overseas accredited teachers' programme, as part of our internationalisation strategy. It is also the first such programme in India. 

"Keele's Initial Teacher Education provision carries the highest grade from OfSTED and this is important as we develop opportunities and partnerships overseas. Teacher Education staff from the School of Public Policy and Professional Practice  will deliver staff development programmes that will ensure quality."

It is intended that the new programme will be the start of a successful partnership with ITARI and a number of areas for future collaboration have been discussed, such as Masters degrees, joint research, early childhood education and the use of technology to support learning.  Staff and student exchanges and student volunteering were also topics that were explored during a recent visit.

Kevin visited Bangalore, Pune and Delhi as part of the due diligence process between 1-9 January.  He was accompanied by Dr Annette Kratz (Centre for International Exchange and Development) and Simon Spencer (Deputy Head of the School of Education, Birmingham City University).

The British Council, the UK's international organisation for cultural relations and education opportunities, will be partnering ITARI in marketing the programme in India.

Kevin added: "The model of training and development that the programme involves is based on Keele's multidisciplinary approach that has been shown to be successful, and this is amenable to adaption for the Indian context. The Keele Professional Graduate Diploma in International Education is a full-time one-year professional course, accredited by Keele.

"It is intended to be world-class qualification that, although being developed in partnership with ITARI on behalf of their three international schools, will be attractive more generally to international schools, many of whom are affiliated to the International Baccalaureate Organisation."

Kevin is pictured with Sushil Mantri, Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Indus Schools.

ASTROPHYSICS GROUP WIN INTERNATIONAL FACILITY TIME

Keele PhD students Mandy Bailey and Masha Lakicevic, with their supervisor Dr Jacco van Loon, pictured left,each won an award of six nights of observing time on the European Southern Observatory's 3.5m New Technology Telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile.

Mandy will measure absorption of starlight by molecules residing in the bubble of warm gas through which the Solar System currently travels, while Masha will image the emission from iron and molecular hydrogen in the gas remnants of recent supernova explosions in the Magellanic Clouds.

STFC Advanced Fellow John Taylor was awarded four nights on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope at La Palma and five nights on the 3.5m telescope at Calar Alto, both in Spain. John will measure the variations in velocity of stars that orbit each other and for which the Kepler satellite has shown that they eclipse each other, thereby obtaining very accurate measurements of the properties of these stars.

Professor Rob Jeffries, pictured right, and Dr Pierre Maxted were awarded four nights on the Nordic Optical Telescope, at La Palma, to investigate a population of very young stars that have been found as a by-product of the SuperWASP survey for transiting extrasolar planets.

Dr James Reeves and PhD student Jason Gofford were awarded 336 kilo-seconds of time on the XMM-Newton satellite, overcoming an over-subscription of approxIimately 7:1. The aims of the program are to perform X-ray spectroscopy of the outflow from the super-massive black hole in the quasar MR 2251-178. The observations will be co-ordinated with previously approved Chandra and HST observations.

Professor Nye Evans, pictured left,with PhD student Sarah Day, got nine shifts of beamtime on beamline I11 at the Diamond Light Source. The project is to use the intense X-rays available at Diamond to study CaCO3 formation in non-aqueous environments by solid-gas carbonation of silicates. This has relevance to the formation of carbonate particles in astrophysical environments, such as the early Solar System, planetary surfaces and evolved stars.

The financial value assigned by STFC to the groundbased facility time for the purposes of RAE/REF metrics, is £377,000.

CFM STATE OF THE NATION

Some 250 members of the Commercial & Facilities Management Directorate (CFM) staff gathered in the Westminster Theatre this week for the directorate's 5th annual "State of the Nation" address.  Members of CFM's Operational Team, who gave presentations including "Enhancing the Student Experience", "Contributing to University Financial Stability" and "Enhancing the University Profile", outlined how the directorate was supporting the University strategy.

There was also video footage of interviews with the Secretary and Registrar, Simon Morris, Rachel Cairns (CFM Assistant Director), Chris Dillon (3rd year student) and the winning team of the Directorate's Total Recognition scheme, the Medical School cleaners.

The event concluded with a question and answer session with CFM's Leadership Team which covered discussions from the car sharing scheme to improving staff communication.

The overall message presented by Jenny Tucker, Director of CFM, was that this will be another challenging year but, through the combined efforts and talents of CFM staff, the Directorate can make a positive impact by delivering customer excellence, by being ambassadors for the University and by contributing to financial stability through income generation and a cost conscious approach.

PLANET WORD

Dr Richard Stephens, School of Psychology, visited the Criterion Theatre in London on Wednesday to take part in some TV filming with Stephen Fry and Brian Blessed.

The sequence, in which Richard, pictured above, ran through some of his psychological experiments on swearing with Stephen and Brian, will be included in Fry's documentary "Planet Word" to be aired on BBC television in Autumn 2011.

COVER ART

An image taken from a recent publication from Dr Divya Chari's laboratory (Research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine - Pickard MR, Jenkins SI, Koller CJ, Furness DN, Chari DM, 2011) has been used as cover art for the January issue of the journal Tissue Engineering Part C Methods.

The figure shows fluorescent magnetic nanoparticles that have been taken up by brain cells called astrocytes, that were derived for cell transplantation purposes.

LEADING CHANGE IN SCIENCE EDUCATION

The annual Association for Science Education Conference, which had the theme 'Leading Change in Science Education', was held at the University of Reading last week. The Science Learning Centre Network joined hundreds of organisations from across the field of science education in offering a wide range of workshops, talks and exhibitions for national and international science educators.

A team from the Keele-based Science Learning Centre West Midlands contributed three workshops, "Effective Practical Work", "Action Research for Physics" and "Fetish Science", to an audience of around 90 teachers, who enjoyed interactive sessions, 'hands on' practical activities, group discussions and teacher input as a part of each of the sessions.

TEACHING POLITICAL ISLAM IN THE UK STUDY

Naveed Sheikh, SPIRE, pictured below, was interviewed on BBC Radio Stoke about the structure of religious authority in Islam in the context of the Hanif Khan court case.

He has been awarded a grant from the Higher Education Academy for a project which will study the teaching of political Islam in the United Kingdom and a grant from the International Journal of Women's Studies to arrange a conference on "Feminism and Terrorism: Gender Studies and the Global War on Terror Ten Years after 9/11".

ENTERPRISE PARTNERSHIP

Two hundred and fifty business leaders came together at Keele to shape the role of the new local enterprise partnership in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire.

The Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Local Enterprise Partnership is a business-led group, which aims to attract investment to the area and push its interests on a national and international stage.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

This week 17 years ago –

Professor E F Evans of the Department of Communication and Neuroscience is to be presented with the Rayleigh Medal of the Institute of Acoustics, in recognition of his long-standing involvement and contribution to acoustics and acoustically-related fields.14 January 1994.