Viva success

Francesca Pannullo successfully defended her thesis on Monday August 28th. Francesca's research was on investigating the association between air pollution, deprivation and cardio-respiratory ill health in Scotland, using spatial statistics conducted within a Bayesian framework. She was supervised by Duncan Lee.

Congratulations Francesca!

Success at Science Slam

The fifth annual Science Slam took place on Thursday 6th July 2017 at Cottiers Theatre. It was a fantastic event with a diverse range of speakers representing six of the seven Schools within the College of Science and Engineering.

For the first time in five years, the winner of the Science Slam was not from the Schools of Engineering or Physics and Astronomy but from Geographical and Earth Sciences (Annemarie Pickersgill). The runners-up were Gözel Shakeri from Computing Science and the School’s own postgraduate student Angela Tabiri.

Angela said: “As a PhD student in pure maths, I am often faced with the challenge of explaining my research to the people I meet who usually do not have a background in pure maths. In an attempt to find a brief way to do so, I decided to participate in this year's Science Slam.

Science Slam 2017 was a fun filled evening where together with seven other students from the College, we thrilled the audience with comedy about our research. The highlight of my presentation was the dance I performed to explain an aspect of my research.

In the end, I was the third prize winner at the competition. Participating in this event has helped me to develop my skills in maths communication and I would encourage more students to take up this challenge.”

Congratulations Angela!

The promotional video is available to view by clicking here and a selection of photographs by clicking here.

An insight in to Ireland’s the Irish Centre for High-End Computing

Postgraduate student Jamie Quinn was in Dublin during July and August to work on a high performance computing project at Ireland's supercomputing centre ICHEC. As part of it all Jamie wrote a few blog posts and made a video. Jamie said:

"During this summer I managed to grab a short research project at the national supercomputing centre for Ireland, ICHEC, in Dublin. While researching the use of radiosity, a measure of light emitted from a surface, in photo-realistic computer graphics, I met some wonderful people, experienced a whole new city (although very similar to Glasgow in every aspect bar price and quality of Guinness!) and even got around to creating a short visualisation explaining my research. You can see the video by clicking here and the blog posts by clicking here.

Poster success at the RSS

Postgraduate student, Qingying Shu won one of three poster prizes at the RSS conference which was held in Glasgow between Tuesday 4th and Friday 7th September. Her poster was chosen from more than 50 and the title of the poster was "The use of online change-point detection methods for space weather storms". Qingying holds a College sensor studentship, working jointly with Physics and Astronomy, Engineering and our School.

Congratulations Qingying!

Mobility Scholarship in Bergamo, Italy

This year the Graduate School awarded one of the Statistics postgraduate students, Yoana Borisova, a mobility scholarship in order to undertake international research at the University of Bergamo in Italy. Yoana explains:

“The purpose of the visit was to collaborate with Dr. Francesco Finazzi, an expert in statistical emulators for air quality models. Emulators are used to substitute complex, expensive and time-consuming model simulations with simpler approximations. At first, I found it really challenging because not only was I meant to learn new statistical models but start coding in MATLAB. However, by the end of my stay in Bergamo, I became a lot more confident in my skills. I had the opportunity to present a poster on the “Advantages of predicting air pollution using multivariate space-time models” during the TIES 2017 conference based on the work I did while in Bergamo.”

“Bergamo is an amazing town in the lower parts of the Italian Alps. In my mind, whenever I have heard Italy, I had imagined a place like Bergamo: the old town has narrow cobbled streets, the buildings are hundreds of years old and the food is absolutely incredible.”

TIES conference attendees (left to right): Prof. Marian Scott, Yoana Borisova, Marnie McLean, Gary Napier, Guowen Huang, Dr. Duncan Lee and Dr. Claire Miller. 

Maths Week Scotland

Maths Week Scotland is a brand new initiative set up by the Scottish Government to “help everyone in our nation see maths positively” and it took place in the week commencing Monday 11th September.
Being the School of Mathematics and Statistics we got involved, with five PhD students from our School visiting four Primary Schools and one Secondary School to promote maths to the pupils. PhD student Suzy Whoriskey explains further:

“Anna, Eilidh, Pete and I visited the four Primary Schools over the course of three days - exhausting work! We worked with P4s and P6s (ages 8-10), introducing ourselves and our PhD projects, challenging them to think of a career or field that doesn't include maths in some aspect (we succeeded here!) and finally playing a 'Maths Relay Challenge' with the pupils. The excitement levels were sky high, a lot of hysterics and running and shouting, and it went down really well with both our pupils and their teachers. One class in particular were so busy with the maths relay that they missed the bell for playtime and moaned "Nooo!" when their teacher told them to stop and get outside.

Overall, it was a great success. We all thoroughly enjoyed going out visiting the schools and got some great feedback from the teachers.”

First published: 11 October 2017

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