The University will host the torch relay as it visits Bath on Tuesday 22 May and we are proud that seven of our staff and students have been selected for the once-in-a-lifetime chance to carry the Olympic Flame, and play a very special part in its journey.

Hanna Wade, Paul James and Fay Hollister have all been chosen to represent the University as part of the Samsung nomination programme. They will all carry the Olympic torch in the Bath area.

Olympic torchbearers (l-r) Andy Hibbert, Hanna Wade, Jamie Barrow, Charlotte Broadhead and Paul James

Hanna is a fourth year undergraduate studying Modern Languages & European Studies. She regularly spends many hours a week volunteering and this year she is chairing the Students’ Union’s RAG committee, which has raised over £100,000 for local charities.

“It took me completely by surprise. It’s an immense honour and I’m very grateful and proud to be given the opportunity to represent the University on such a fantastic occasion.”

— Hannah Wade

Paul is a third year undergraduate studying Coach Education & Sports Development. He volunteers over 20 hours a week in Bath, including volunteering at Mencap’s Super Saturday Club and at Culverhay School. He is currently setting up a charitable organisation to enhance cultural, social and economic exchange between children in Zambia and the UK.

“I am delighted to be part of the Olympics in this way; it’s a real honour and I’m looking forward to the day.”

Fay is a member of administrative staff in the Department of Mechanical Engineering She volunteers for the Youth Offending Team and gives up her time to support young offenders within the community.

“To have been nominated and selected was so unexpected. I feel very proud and privileged to be able to represent my local community in such an important role.”

Staff members Greg Sharpe and Andy Hibbert were both nominated by the British Olympic Foundation – the charitable arm of the British Olympic Association.

As Sports Development Manager, Greg runs events and initiatives to inspire local young people through sport and the Olympic values. He has organised the annual Olympic Day Run on campus for the past ten years.

He is also part of the steering group of the National Olympic Academy, a forum that works to introduce more young people to the Olympic movement and connects with other national academies around the world. He will carry the Olympic torch on Tuesday 22 May on the outskirts of Bath and Bristol.

Andy has been involved with the Olympic Foundation since its set up in 1992. He has led Olympic camps and projects to introduce young people to Olympic sports and values and, as a teaching fellow in the Department of Sports Development & Recreation, used his expertise in education to advise the Foundation on its information for schools. He is on the steering group of the National Olympic Academy, and this year he will also attend a conference in Olympia for Directors of National Olympic Associations.

“Carrying the torch is a very unexpected but welcome prize for something that I have done for years and really enjoyed doing. I do it because it’s something I believe in – working with youngsters and giving them opportunities is what I’ve been doing all my working life.”

— Andy Hibbert

Andy will carry the torch on Sunday 20 may in Torquay, as will one of his students Charlotte Broadhead.

Charlotte is in her second year of studying Coach Education & Sports Development. She was nominated to carry the torch by Sport England and Active Devon. She has been involved in volunteering since school, through the Duke of Edinburgh awards, and as a qualified volunteer netball and trampoline coach. She was a national trampoline champion, inspiring children of all ages, abilities and disabilities. She went on to become a British Colleges Sport regional and national ambassador and has volunteered for national sports governing bodies. She now captains our Students’ Union’s trampoline club. She has also been selected to volunteer at the London 2012 Beach Volleyball.“When I found out I was a torchbearer, I was in complete shock! I never thought I would get nominated by not just Active Devon, but Sport England as well. I feel honoured and proud to be representing not just the South West, but also around the country and everywhere I have been. I cannot wait to carry the torch!”

Jamie Barrow is a third year Sports Performance undergraduate and he has been chosen to carry the torch as a Lloyds TSB Local Hero. He will carry the torch in Bath. Jamie has been on the British Snowboard Cross Team for the past four years and is aiming to compete at the Winter Olympics in 2014. He was first selected as a Lloyds TSB hero in 2010 and he volunteers for the RELAYS projects that is using the Games to encourage young people and their communities to get involved in sport and cultural activities. He also gives presentations to inspire people through his experiences of sport and international competition.

“This is something you’ll never forget, something you would tell your grandchildren. I’m just so excited and really proud to be able to carry it. It’s quite hard to understand just how amazing it is.”

“You think about the Olympics as the great sporting event on earth, and just being part of it is incredible.”

— Jamie Barrow

Multiple bus tickets are available on the buses and we are currently in discussion with First and Wessex Connect about installing bus pass renewal facilities on campus.

STA Travel are still offering special prices for students in Bath, with an extra £20 off your holiday if you book an appointment through the STA website.

The branch’s contact details will stay the same: 0871 702 9802 or email bath@statravel.co.uk.

Preference will be given to workers in the following priority subject areas:

• agriculture
• forestry and food sciences
• biotechnology
• development strategies
• earth and marine sciences
• engineering
• health and related social sciences
• information technology
• management for change
• professional education and training
• social and cultural development
• university development and management.

The awards include:

Swansea University Fulton Fellowship – Tenable at Swansea University. Awarded for any of the priority subjects listed above. Country of Tenure: United Kingdom.

The University of Manitoba Fellowship – Tenable at the University of Manitoba. Awarded for any of the priority subject areas listed above. Country of Tenure: Canada.

The George Weston Limited, Canada, Fellowship – Awarded in agriculture, forestry, and food science/ food technology. Country of Tenure: Any Commonwealth country other than home country.

The University of Oxford Fellowship – Tenable at the University of Oxford. Awarded in any of the priority subject areas listed above. Country of Tenure: United Kingdom.

The Worshipful Company of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales Fellowship – At least one Fellowship open to professionally qualified accountants or to established members of university faculties or related fields. Tenable at a Commonwealth university which provides courses that are approved by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, or are closely allied to  business education.  Section A of the nomination form may be completed either by the head of the candidate’s firm/company, or by the Executive Head of the proposed host university. Country of Tenure: Any Commonwealth country other than home country.

The Jacky McAleer Memorial Fellowship – In memory of Jacky McAleer, a former member of staff of the ACU, and in recognition of her long and outstanding service to the ACU. Awarded in the field of information technology, with priority given to the computerisation of record systems or computer-assisted learning. Country of Tenure: Any Commonwealth country other than home country.

The Gordon and Jean Southam Fellowship – Open to nominees of any of the Canadian universities in membership of the ACU. Awarded for any of the priority subject areas listed above. Country of Tenure: Any Commonwealth country other than home country.

Applications will be considered only if the applicant is approved by the Vice-Chancellor of a university in ACU membership. Fellowships will be tenable for up to a maximum of six months.

The closing date for applications is 1 June 2012.

For further information and details of how to apply, please visit the ACU website or contact:
Ashling Haslehurst
Membership Assistant
The Association of Commonwealth Universities
Woburn House
20-24 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9HF
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7380 6717
Fax: +44 (0)20 7387 2655
Ashling.Haslehurst@acu.ac.uk

The popular exhibition, organised by the Researcher Development Unit and sponsored by the University’s EPSRC Knowledge Transfer Account, aims to explain research that takes place at the University through the use of eye-catching images. 

This year the theme of the exhibition was Research in Your World and entrants were set the challenge of showing images that depict research that has relevance to everyone’s world.  

They were asked to do this by explaining how their research relates to the world we know – this could be in an obvious way or indirectly through the society or environment in which we live. 

The entries were judged at a preview evening in 4West by Professor Jane Millar, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, the University’s Director of Marketing & Communications Tim Kaner and Sophie Duncan, Deputy Director of the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE).

All of the entries were then exhibited in The Octagon in Milsom Place, attracting more than 400 visitors who were invited to vote for their favourite.

The winners were:

Judges choices:

Best Overall – Dr Melina Freitag, Dept Mathematical Sciences

Best Image – Hannah Family, Dept Pharmacy & Pharmacology

Best Abstract – Dr Richard Burke, Dept of Mechanical Engineering

Public vote:

First place – Dr Melina Freitag, Dept Mathematical Sciences

Second place – Tori Hammond, Dept Biology & Biochemistry

The exhibition will be on show on Level 2 of the University library from 7 to 21 June.

The entry was an illustration called ‘A Community Pharmacist’s Brain’ which showed everything that can be happening in the brain of the pharmacist and how they can easily become overloaded with work, environmental and personal stressors.

Hannah’s research looks at the relationship between the mental workload of pharmacists and the rate of dispensing errors. Mental workload is a measure of the impact these stressors are having on individual’s mental processes and can index times when performance or accuracy on workplace tasks can be impaired.

While mistakes are very rare, dispensing errors such as giving the wrong directions on the use of a medication, dispensing the wrong drug or the wrong dose have the potential to harm patients. This is why the research team believe it is vital to study the human factors involved in community pharmacy practice.

picture by Joe Kinrade

Hannah, who was awarded funding from the Pharmaceutical Trust for Charitable & Educational Objects (PTECO), is part of research team led by Dr Jane Sutton and supported by Professor Marjorie Weiss.

The team is carrying out a simulated study in which community pharmacists are asked to perform routine pharmacy tasks whilst their performance and their mental workload are measured.

Hannah completed her undergraduate degree in psychology and after working in a hospital for a year she went on to do a Masters in neuropsychology before coming to Bath in 2008 as a research assistant. The mental workload study is being carried out for her PhD which she started in 2010.

She said: “The role of the community pharmacist can be a stressful one especially at the moment as the profession is currently expanding to take on new roles and also meet the annual increases in prescriptions to be filled. What makes community pharmacy an interesting workplace to study is the fact that the pace and volume of work can change rapidly and sometimes unpredictably.

“People can generally deal with these types of stresses but many tasks that pharmacists carry out require acute attention to detail (e.g. checking medicines prepared by colleagues) and it can often be difficult for our brains to pick up mistakes that have been made by ourselves or our colleagues when we are under time pressure or unpredictable workload.

“Errors are also very rare which can cause an unconscious bias and make these events difficult to detect. Our study is looking into the specific factors, like time pressures and these unconscious biases that affect pharmacists ability to identify potentially dangerous medicine errors.”

Hannah is running two experiments; one with pharmacy students and another with community pharmacists in the simulated pharmacy based at the University.

She said: “Once we have the results we will work with pharmacists and pharmacy students to devise strategies to help them identify times when they become overloaded and how they can avoid this.”

Hannah said she was delighted to be chosen by judges as the winner of the Best Images category of the competition.

She said: “It was really cool! I’ve always enjoyed art and I wanted to explain visually what mental workload is, sometimes a picture is much easier to relate to than words.

“I think we, as researchers, have a big responsibility to communicate our research to people especially because it helps us demonstrate how relevant the work we are doing is to people’s lives.

“This piece of research is relevant to people because everyone uses a pharmacist. We also all experience mental overload at times in our lives and so this research may spur on individuals to consider the human factors involved in their own work.  

“I really enjoy talking to people about my research and trying to use my knowledge to help others. More importantly though, I learn so much about my field through talking to people about it. As mental overload is a human experience everyone can teach me something about what it is like to experience it from their point of view which helps me develop a keener understanding of mental workload.

“We had lots of great feedback from the exhibition, one man said how lucky we are to be doing such interesting research at the University and I agree!”

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Dr Darren Cosker will spend four years working in collaboration with animation giant Double Negative, the company behind box office hits such as Harry Potter, Inception, 2012 and Iron Man. He will work closely with the company’s research and development team to take the technology used to create facial animation to the next level.

Darren has worked closely with Double Negative over recent years, exploring the problems faced by artists in producing life-like facial animations for use in films.

He applied for the Royal Society Fellowship as he felt it would offer him a fantastic opportunity to work directly with the company in developing technologies and providing solutions to these problems, and is thrilled that his application was successful.

Darren said: “Double Negative is a world-leading special effects company – they are right at the front of development and innovation in this sector. The opportunity to work with them on the next generation of animated film is extremely exciting for me as an individual, and also for the University’s dedicated Centre for Digital Entertainment.

“The Centre runs an EngD (postgraduate) degree programme which places students in companies for the majority of their studies. They benefit from carrying out research with real-world applications, and the companies benefit from academic input into their research and development.

“I am hoping that my Fellowship will further develop the Centre’s relationship with Double Negative and create even more opportunities for our students in the future.”

Digital entertainment is one of Britain’s fastest growing industries, making the education of capable students in this sector essential. By working closely with leading companies, academic staff at Bath are able to ensure teaching is relevant and current – preparing students for the reality they will face in industry.

Darren said: “As fifty per cent of my time will be based at the University, I will be teaching students and hope that the learnings from my collaboration with Double Negative help to influence my teaching. This is a very fast-moving sector and it is very exciting to be at the forefront of change and to bring that back to the classroom.”

Darren’s Fellowship begins in July 2012 and will continue for a duration of four years.

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The annual event is traditionally hosted at top research universities in North America and Europe, including Oxford and Birmingham in the UK and Carnegie-Mellon in the US.

Programming is the process of designing, writing, testing and maintaining the source code, or instructions, of computer programs. Programmers use a variety of different programming languages – based on mathematical principles.

The conference in Bath is dedicated to the theoretical, fundamental areas of mathematics, logic and computer science that are related to models of computation, in general, and to the semantics of programming languages in particular.

The event will provide a forum for researchers in mathematics and computer science to meet and exchange ideas, discuss problems and create collaborations.

Professor Guy McCusker and Dr John Power from the University of Bath’s Logic and Semantics group in the Department of Computer Science are hosting the event.

Professor McCusker said: “Hosting this well established event, which harks back to the work of Alan Turing and foundational work in computing, here in Bath, is testament to the excellent standard of mathematical computational research taking place.

“This strength in fundamental computer science at one end of the scale really complements the local buzz of applied digital activity at the other. 

“The MFPS conference confirms Bath’s role as a leading participant in international computing research. The event brings together experts in a field that lays the foundations for a reliable, safe and secure software-enabled future, and is a fantastic opportunity for our staff and students to rub shoulders with leaders in the global theoretical computer science community.”

This is the second time in a matter of months that an international digital conference has put Bath on the map – with the X Media Lab making a big impact in March.

The conference will include sessions on topics from constructive mathematics, programming language theory and formal languages through to game semantics and quantum computation.

The event takes place from 6 – 9 June 2012, and is partially supported by the US Office of Naval Research.

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We live in a world dominated by technology, from the Internet to the IPad and the mobile phone to GPS.  Yet how many of us realise that all of this technology is based on mathematics, and that without maths the modern world would not exist.

In this talk Professor Budd describes the maths that makes internet giants like Google function, and is behind the programming of the iPod and the mobile phone. He will also show how maths had led to the modern information revolution. No previous knowledge of maths is needed, but please bring your imagination!

Chris Budd’s research involves applying maths to industry and he works on such varied projects as weather forecasting, radar, electricity supply, alternative energy, microwave cooking and the mathematics of dancing. A passionate populariser of maths he is also Chair of Maths at the Royal Institution and a Fellow of the British Science Association.

This lecture is part of the University’s General University Lecture Programme. Others in the series include:

30 May – Ms Mary Dunst looks back at one of the famous figures of the Victorian literary world, Honorary Mayoress of Bath, Madame Sarah Grand.

13 June – Mr Andrew Ryan will examine the current and future challenges to sport as well as the economics of the Olympic Movement and the position of the UK in the global sports matrix.

The lecture is taking place on campus in Lecture Theatre 5 West 2.3 and starts at 5.15pm. Free parking is available in the University’s West Car Park after 5pm.

He entered the competition because he felt it had two major benefits – showcasing the breadth and significance of the University’s research to the public, and also personally for him to exercise the skill of explaining a very complex research area in an engaging way.

Dr  Burke’s research takes place in Bath’s new £800K Turbo Centre which has been designed to focus exclusively on the development of low carbon turbocharged engines.

picture by Joe Kinrade

He said: “The research we are doing through the Centre will have an impact on everyone – it is key to delivering fuel efficiency and affordable transportation, so will make a difference to anyone using a vehicle. Therefore being able to explain our work to the public is very important.”

With the deadline of 2020 for the UK’s carbon targets looming, immediate action is required to address the emissions generated from vehicle use. While many alternatives to fossil fuels are being explored, engineers from the University of Bath say these will not be ready to contribute to 2020 targets.

Key technologies aimed at reducing carbon emissions from transportation are hydrogen fuel cells, electric vehicles and biofuels. Dr Burke believes that none of these alternatives are ready to replace our reliance on fossil fuels for mass market vehicles in the near future, making it necessary to focus on improving the technology already used in mass market, fossil fuel burning vehicles.

To do this, the new centre in Bath aims to develop new downsizing technologies that can be applied to both petrol and diesel engines, allowing them to reduce fuel consumption while still giving the performance of a large engine.

The centre is carrying out its work in collaboration with the UK’s leading vehicle manufacturers, Ford and Jaguar Land Rover, as well as turbocharger manufacturer Cummins Turbo Technologies.

Dr Burke said: “There is a significant gap between the automotive industry and turbocharging manufacturers, so our activities through the centre are working to encourage a more open approach to design with collaboration between all elements of the industry.”

By incorporating turbocharging into smaller engines, power can be maintained while significantly decreasing the size of the engine and the amount of fuel required to run it.

Working with leading vehicle manufacturers ensures the knowledge achieved through this research can be taken up in industry at a faster rate. This is supported by Bath’s EPSRC funded Knowledge Transfer Account which looks at developing innovative ways to accelerate the translation of research outputs into business opportunities.

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Dr Freitag’s entry, titled Come Rain or Shine, was selected for first place by both the judges of the competition and members of the public who visited the public exhibition in Bath.

Her image was a montage of pictures she has taken of different weather conditions at the University campus. The accompanying abstract explained how collaboration between the Met Office and researchers in the Department of Mathematical Sciences helps to improve the weather forecast by finding better and faster techniques to solve the mathematical equations that describe the dynamics of the atmosphere.

picture by Joe Kinrade

Dr Freitag, who completed her PhD at Bath and is now a lecturer, was awarded a Great Western Research Fellowship to study weather forecasting in 2007. She spent six weeks with the Met Office learning about the problems they encounter predicting the weather.

She said: “Weather forecasts are created by combining physical and mathematical models of the atmosphere with observations, using a method called data assimilation.

“There is a lot of work currently being done by mathematicians on how to improve this method to get more accurate forecasts. We created a smaller version of this set up here in Bath in order to investigate and try out new and better algorithms for the data assimilation process.”

Dr Freitag said she was surprised but pleased to be chosen as the winner. She said: “I have been interested in photography since I got my first camera when I was about 10. I enjoy the challenge of taking pictures in different light conditions, and capturing the University of Bath campus under the wide variety of weather conditions throughout the year was a fun thing to do.

“My favourite photos to take were those in the snow – as the reflections of the sun in the snow made these pictures particularly challenging to take.

“I think it is important to tell people about the research we do at the University. It might be that not everyone can understand the technical aspect of research, but everyone can relate to the weather because it affects us all.

“We had visitors from all over the world at the exhibition and they all said it was interesting and a really good idea.”

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