Viva success

Craig Wilkie successfully defended his thesis on Tuesday 17th October. Craig's research focused on developing statistical methodology for fusing lake water quality data obtained from satellites and directly from the lake surface, in a Bayesian hierarchical modelling framework. He was supervised by Claire Miller.

Mengyi Gong successfully defended her thesis on Friday 20th October. Mengyi's research was on modelling coherence and evidence for long-term change in environmental time series. She was supervised by Claire Miller and Marian Scott OBE.

Irene Marinas successfully defended her thesis on Friday 8th December. Irene's research was on joint modelling of discrete and complex continuous data types evolving along phylogenies. She was supervised by Adrian Bowman and Vincent Macaulay.

Tusharkanti Ghosh successfully defended his thesis on Friday 8th December too. Tusharkanti's research was on bayesian modeling approaches for the analysis of genome- wide association studies. He was supervised by Mayetri Gupta.

Samuel Evington successfully defended his thesis on Thursday 14th December. Samuel's research was on w*-bundles. He was supervised by Stuart White and Christian Voigt.

Congratulations to all!

European Science Slam finals

Postgraduate student Angela Tabiri represented the School and the University at the European Science Slam finals in Brno on Monday 4th December. Angela said the following about the experience:

“It was a privilege for me to represent University of Glasgow at the European Science Slam Finals. In all, there were seven contestants representing the following countries: Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Finland, Switzerland, Sweden and Scotland. Presentations ranged from poetry to having a dog on stage. I repeated the talk I gave at the Science Slam organised in Glasgow in July. However, I modified it by interacting with the audience to find out whether the dance I did was commutative or non-commutative. This enabled me to get a feedback on whether the audience understood my talk or not. At the end of the keenly contested competition, the Swedish representative, Andreas Dahlin was crowned the winner of European Science Slam 2017. Even though I did not win the competition, I got the opportunity to talk about my research to an audience of over 500 and got feedback from the audience about the presentation.”

Co.lab smart campus challenge

Postgraduate students Jamie Quinn and Kellan Steele took part in the co.lab Smart Campus Challenge where, as part of a six person team, they were tasked with coming up with an inventive new idea for solving a problem produced by the campus development and expansion. The event was held in the Kelvin Gallery on Friday 17th November. Jamie explains:

“We figured one of the biggest problems was simply the lack of raw data, along with good visualisation tools. At the celebration event on Friday 17th November, we presented some ideas for simple feedback systems, environmental sensor modules and machine learning based techniques for campus congestion management. Although our team didn't end up winning the final prize for our presentation, we had a tonne of fun collaborating with engineers and other scientists and playing with some neat electronics in the makerspace tent. Look out for the (more) permanent makerspace in the Library!"

Thursday Fika

Postgraduate student representative Suzy Whoriskey has organised Thursday "Fika" – a concept in Swedish culture with the basic meaning "to have coffee", often accompanied with pastries, cookies or pie. Suzy explains:


“I’ve organised a weekly coffee morning for the postgraduate students within the School. Each office is responsible for baking or buying treats to bring in for one week, with a different office chosen each week. Every Thursday at 10.30am we meet in the social space in the postgraduate suite and enjoy an hour where we eat cakes, have a coffee and chat with the other postgraduate students.

It's been really successful and such fun – almost everyone joins in and it has been a great way to meet others and introduce the 1st year students to everyone. We get to try so many different traditional cakes and bakes from each country, as we have so many nationalities – it's smashing! It has also been a good way to make use of the postgraduate suite in the new building."

"The One With The Christmas Jumpers" Fika

Suzy continues:

"After the success of semester 1 Thursday Fika's, we decided that for our last Fika before Christmas it would be an everyone-join-in bake. Any students that wanted to contribute did and we invited all the staff along to join in the cake-eating, chatting and coffee morning. It was a great success too! There were many cakes - a lot Christmas Themed - and a good turnout of Christmas jumpers! We're having a break from Fikas for the Christmas break - but will be starting back up in January with Office 232 picking up the baking.”

PGR Community Gardening project

Another initiative Suzy is involved in is the University’s Community Gardening project. A group of research students have been tending to the University’s Community Gardens on Viewfield Lane in an effort to maintain a healthy mindset and create a communal green space for staff and students to enjoy.

The PGR Community Gardening project is an initiative lead by Researcher Development who developed the idea through their continued efforts to find alternative ways of promoting ‘PGR Self Care’ and offering more opportunities for researchers to socialise with colleagues from across the University.

You can read more about this, and hear Suzy’s thoughts on the project, in MyGlasgow News at the following link: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/news/peopleprojects/headline_560374_en.html

First published: 19 December 2017

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