President's weekly update
11 July 2019
You may have seen in the news that Jodrell Bank Observatory has been added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. This amazing news is down to the very hard work over a number of years by the team at Jodrell, but particularly Professors Teresa Anderson and Tim O’Brien. They were in Baku, Azerbaijan, when the case was considered and I was watching live on Sunday morning. There is also a blog from Teresa and Tim on Viewpoint.
The announcement was very timely because this week I attended and gave the welcome at the official opening of the international headquarters of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) at the Jodrell Bank site which marked the official handover of the building from the University to SKA. Professor Mark Thompson, Executive Chair of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which manages large UK science and technology facilities and helped to fund the SKA HQ, was among the speakers and among the 200 attendees were representatives of the countries that participate in SKA.
The official announcement has been made that we have been awarded £25 million from the UK Research Partnership Infrastructure Fund towards the new Paterson Building which will replace the building on The Christie site that was badly damaged by fire.
We have been very busy with degree ceremonies all this week – and these will continue next week too. This is my favourite time of year as it’s a celebration of the achievements of our students and the hard work our staff have put into helping them attain their degrees. At the ceremonies I have presided over so far, many staff joined the celebrations in their gowns and the graduands included a significant number of overseas students. One PhD student who was graduating from the School of Materials handed me a lovely bunch of purple flowers - most unexpected!
I gave a talk to about 100 schoolchildren at Loreto High School in Chorlton about my career, research and being a Vice-Chancellor. They asked some great questions such as what in my career made me most proud and what did I regret most? They were very proud of their links to the University and wish to strengthen these.
Members of the Senior Leadership Team and I held a meeting with senior academic staff from across the University to discuss ‘Our Future’, our vision and strategic plan and its implementation. We considered the clarity of the messages, the importance of holding true to the comments that came over so strongly through our very extensive consultation and choosing carefully our measures of success - while keeping the document succinct and having a very clear one page summary.
I met a group of staff from all parts of the University to hear what they like and what we need to do better. Academic staff said that they found The University of Manchester much more collegiate and collaborative than their previous universities. All felt that many of our processes are too complex and slow and they wanted to hear my views on the Augar report on post-18 education and funding, the likely future profile of students, including international students, and what I thought The University of Manchester might be like in 20 years from now.
At the end of our Planning and Resources Committee, Paul Marks-Jones, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Partner, updated us on LGBT+ activities over the past year, then we all had a photo taken to mark Manchester Pride celebrations.
Paul Ramsbottom, Chief Executive of the Wolfson Foundation, and Charles Townley-Wolfson, a member of the Wolfson charity board, visited us to discuss the success of projects that have benefitted from Wolfson capital funding. We were joined by Alistair Hudson, Director of the Whitworth, and Esme Ward, Director of the Manchester Museum, both of which have had generous support from Wolfson. We also discussed future bids that we may submit.
We were all sorry to learn that Steve Dauncey, our Director of Finance, has decided to retire. Steve has done a great job and will be greatly missed, but we wish him all the best in his future retirement.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor