President's Weekly Update
30 October 2014
The University has been awarded £24 million from the Medical Research Council (MRC) for clinical research. We were successful in all three areas of funding available - stratified medicine, dementia and single cell functional genomics. The awards include £13 million to establish a Clinical Proteomics Centre (to allow detailed profiling of body tissues) led by Professor Tony Whetton in the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences. This great news came at the same time as we saw a big increase in our overall success in MRC funding - we now have one of the highest success rates (33%) of applications in the UK.
You may have already heard that Foundation Day was a great success. We celebrated exactly ten years since The University of Manchester was formed on 22 October 2004, with a fantastic lecture from Professor Jeanette Winterson, the acclaimed author and a member of staff in our Centre for New Writing. Her lecture was called ‘Gradgrind to Graphene’ and received a standing ovation. You can see it on StaffNet at:
The film that was made to mark our tenth anniversary has already been viewed nearly 70,000 times, with many ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ on social media. You can view this at:
At the celebrations we awarded honorary doctorates to Jeannette; Professor Dame Julia King (Vice-Chancellor of Aston University) who has done a great deal to promote women in science and engineering; and Simon Weston, who was badly injured in the Falklands War and now does a great deal of charity work to support those who have suffered injury and disfigurement and to raise funds for research into wound healing. Simon is an ambassador for the Healing Foundation and we have a research centre in the Faculty of Life Sciences supported by this organisation which is led by Professor Enrique Amaya, who read Simon’s citation. You can view the honorary degree ceremony at:
It wasn’t until after the event that Andre Geim told me that it was also on 22 October 2004 that his ground-breaking paper with Kostya Novoselov on graphene was published in Science. It was this publication that ultimately led to their award of the Nobel Prize in Physics in October 2010. What a day that was!
One of our University spin out companies, C4X Discovery was successfully launched on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market for smaller growing companies and was valued at £31 million. C4XD (previously known as Conformetrix) is a drug development company with a leading technology for rational drug discovery and design which was co-founded by Professor Andrew Almond in the Faculty of Life Sciences.
You may remember that our University website was redesigned and re-built in April this year by the Division of Communications and Marketing and has clearly been well received externally. ‘Sitemorse’ assesses websites across 330 universities, colleges and higher education institutes in the UK. Our ranking rose from 73rd earlier in the year to 14th and we are the highest ranking Russell Group university. By another assessment carried out by ‘SimilarWeb’ our University website was ranked top out of 50 universities and colleges.
Our Global Leadership Board (GLB), chaired by Dr Rory Brooks, met in Manchester. This group of very successful alumni and friends of the University help us with fundraising and offer advice on our strategy. On Sunday we all attended the football match at Manchester United who played Chelsea. It was a one all draw but quite exciting as the United goal was in the last minute. Difficult for a couple of our guests who were Chelsea supporters sitting in the United end!
The next day I gave our GLB members an update on the University and Dr Eric Li dialled in from Hong Kong to tell us about progress of the University’s Foundation there. Chris Cox, Director of Development and Alumni Relations (DDAR) gave an overview of philanthropy; Dominic Boyd from DDAR updated us on capital investments; and Professor Colin Bailey, Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, spoke about advanced materials and graphene. We had dinner in the beautiful Reading Room at our John Rylands Library on Deansgate and saw the amazing exhibit of ‘breathing books’. I’ll say no more - but worth seeing!
I was filmed to give my continuing support to the ‘We Get It’ campaign. This is a joint initiative between the University and our Students’ Union that began with a focus on zero tolerance on sexual harassment. This is a really important campaign for staff and students and the second phase 'We Get It' zero tolerance to bullying and harassment more widely is due to begin in November. You can find out more about this campaign at:
Professor Luke Georghiou (Vice-President for Research and Innovation) and I co-chaired a very successful first meeting of the Steering Committee of the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) which we will host in July 2016. We held the meeting at Manchester Central and the visitors from across Europe were very impressed by the venue and proximity to hotels and the city centre and by the great progress made, largely thanks to our Programme Director Vicky Rosin. The ESOF website will be up and running soon and calls for proposals for sessions will open in 2015.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor
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