Awards and Prizes

Professor Daniele Faccio awarded Italian honour

IMAGE DANIELE Professor Daniele Faccio, School of Physics & Astronomy, has been awarded the honour of Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia (Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy). The award recognises the contributions of Italians living abroad and was presented by the Italian Ambassador at the Italian Embassy in Edinburgh.

Medal Of the Order of the British Empire for Honorary Research Associate

IMAGE PETER LAW Peter Law, Honorary Research Associate in the Institute for Gravitational Research, was awarded the Medal of the Order of the British Empire (BEM) in the Queen’s New Year Honours for voluntary services to Advanced Higher Physics Education in Glasgow.

Peter graduated from UoG in 1969 with honours in Natural Philosophy and embarked on a successful career as a Physics teacher. On his retirement in 2006 he was in contact with his childhood friend Prof. Jim Hough and volunteered his services to the University to become Advanced Higher Support Co-ordinator. In this post he supports pupils carrying out Advanced Higher Physics experiments, both in schools and at UoG. There has been growing demand from schools and the team now includes Colin Butler and Jim Grace, who support over 200 pupil visits per session.

Peter is also an Honorary Research Fellow with research interests in old school and undergraduate physics experiments, usually from before 1980, and how they can be re-visited using modern instruments.

On receiving his honour, Peter said “I am surprised and delighted with my BEM I have received. However, I feel a little guilty that I should be so honoured for such enjoyable voluntary work.”

Engineer Recognised by NATO

IMAGE CERTIFICATE Professor Kostas Kontis, James Watt School of Engineering, was part of the team awarded a 2021 NATO Science and Technology Office (STO) Excellence Award for their work on Innovative Control Effectors for Manoeuvring of Air Vehicles, and Demonstration. The work of the team was called “an outstanding example of multidisciplinary teaming of academia, government, and industry collaborating to find solutions to complex problems to help the defence of NATO nations.”

The STO Excellence Award recognises exceptional accomplishments in recent STO activities, conducted and completed during the last four years.

2021 Mardia Prize for Digital Earth workshop

IMAGE VINNY Dr Vinny Davies, School of Mathematics & Statistics, has been awarded the 2021 Mardia Prize from the Royal Statistical Society. The Prize is awarded for interdisciplinary workshops to bring together statisticians and non-statisticians to tackle emerging challenges. The winning workshop topic is Analytics for Digital Earth and will bring researchers together to create a digital replica of the earth, to better understand relationships between the environment and society. They will use this replica to identify sub-systems which have the greatest data and analytics needs, and develop future plans to address these needs in a collaborative manner. An initial workshop took place on 3rd February 2022, with the follow up in late May 2022.

Pakistan Award

NEW IMAGE PAKISTAN AWARD Congratulations to Qammer H. Abbasi (Reader, James Watt School of Engineering and Deputy Head for Communication Sensing and Imaging group) for receiving 'Pakistan Award' in the International Conference on Microwave, Antennas and Circuits for his excellent contributions and services to Antenna and RF research in Pakistan. The President of Pakistan addressed in the concluding session of this conference.