Avenue Winter 2019─20

5 things we are celebrating

1 LAW IS MOVING UP

We’re celebrating a significant rise for the School of Law in the THE’s subject rankings, to bring it into the top 50 law schools in the world. Ranked at 52 in the world last year, the school has climbed to 41 in 2019. Professor Jane Mair is head of the school and believes that it is collegiality which makes a difference. “Whether academic or administrative, Scots law or international, legal theorist or professional practitioner, it’s the connections we make across the school which allow us to improve our collective performance.” 

2 STARTING OUT

We’ve started work on the third major new building to be delivered through our campus development programme. The £50 million Clarice Pears Building will be a new home for our Institute of Health & Wellbeing and will revolutionise the way health inequalities are tackled. It will bring together staff from ten different sites into a single multidisciplinary centre for health, to produce world-leading research on policy, practice and behaviours that will improve global health and reduce inequalities.

It will also provide an ideal setting to support working with partners such as the NHS, government, voluntary sector and industry. This will allow research to be translated into policy change, achieving a real impact on health.

3 MAJOR FUNDING AWARDS TO STAFF

Two of our researchers are among 300 top scientists and scholars across Europe who have received major awards from the European Research Council.

Dr Marios Philiastides of the Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology has been awarded €2m over five years to focus on human decision making and learning. He says: “Our team will be working to uncover the processes by which the human brain learns, through trial and error, to make better predictions and plan future actions.” The team hopes the work will help inform future developments in machine learning and AI and, more specifically, how recent incarnations of artificial neural networks could learn to deal with an ever-increasing number of “big data” applications.

Professor Anja Neundorf of the School of Social & Political Sciences has also been awarded €2m. Her research aims to find solutions to the causes of democratic backsliding, a new global phenomenon. She says: “My research is a global study and will look at how to strengthen democracy and test the potential power of social media in this process – how it motivates people and how they participate in the political process. I hope through this five-year project that we learn better how we educate people on how politics work.”

4 NEW CANCER TESTS

A suite of new cancer tests could give patients better access to new treatments and trials. The tests have been developed at Glasgow and they analyse the genetic code from a sample of a patient’s cancer to look for biological markers that indicate which trial drugs would work and which would not.

The tests can also check for certain changes in the patient’s genes that may explain why the cancer developed in the first place. Designed to be used for any cancer, the tests are currently being evaluated by NHS labs in England and Scotland, as well as being used in the University of Glasgow-led Precision-Panc clinical trials programme for patients with pancreatic cancer.

5 COMMITTED TO GENDER EQUALITY 

We’ve achieved four new Athena SWAN awards in recognition of our ongoing commitment to gender equality for staff and students, bringing the current total to an impressive 20 awards across the University. The awards include two Silver Awards for the Institutes of Cancer Sciences and Cardiovascular & Medical Sciences, and two Bronze awards for the Adam Smith Business School and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre.

This article was first published January 2020.