Surrey celebrates the best of its research
Saturday 19 January 2008
The University of Surrey recently celebrated all aspects of its research at its inaugural Festival of Research. The aim of the festival was to bring together staff and students to celebrate research best practice and foster internal communication and collaboration. A particular emphasis at this first event was multidisciplinary research and trying to bring together different groups of researchers to tackle common problems.
The event was opened by a keynote talk by Sir Derek Wanless, who gave insight into how he brought together teams of people to work on the different NHS reviews he has conducted. Sir Derek was particularly keen to take part because of the emphasis on multidisciplinary work, which he considers important.
The University has recently brought several of its disciplines together to form four faculties. During the morning of the festival, each faculty got together to showcase the work they are doing to help start new collaborations within the newly formed faculties. Examples include the Advanced Technology Institutes’ ‘trapped rainbow’ recently published in Nature, the Postgraduate Medical School’s potential anticancer therapy, and the Centre for Research on Ageing and Gender’s research on sleep in later life.
The highlight of the day was the lunchtime poster session at which over 150 posters were exhibited by staff and research students. The participation of students in this event shows the strong emphasis on educating the next generation of researchers that Surrey has.
Dr Fraser Macfarlane of the Faculty of Management and Law highlighted that "to be successful, you need to collaborate – you need to develop collaborative links." The poster session was especially important in providing plenty of opportunities for students and staff alike to find collaborators for their work from across the disciplines, whilst celebrating the quality of the work being presented.
The poster session also gave the opportunity for presenters to get feedback on their work. The Vice Chancellor, Professor Christopher Snowden, commented: "For many people, they probably don’t release how good their work they’re doing actually is. This is a chance for them to gain some positive feedback and support."
During the afternoon, Professor Christopher Snowden gave a talk on his own research, demonstrating that, whilst still running a successful University, he remains research active and producing high quality work.
To help consolidate multidisciplinary work further, the afternoon sessions were dedicated to helping different groups get together on new projects. One example of this was the session on audio description, which is an additional sound track added to a film for the hearing impaired. This subject cuts across a number of disciplines, including languages, translation, media and computer science.
Further details on the festival, including details on speakers, session abstracts and a short video of the event can be found at http://www.surrey.ac.uk/research/festival/
Media Enquiries
Peter La, Press Office at the University of Surrey, Tel: +44 (0)1483 689191, or Email mediarelations@surrey.ac.uk