President's weekly update
26 September 2019
Pictured: Nancy with Manchester graduate Liu Daming
We were named the top UK university for graduate employability by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide. We also won the Institute for Environmental Management and Assessment award for environmental sustainability for our ‘10,000 Actions’ to encourage staff to take personal actions to support sustainability.
I travelled to Beijing and Singapore for packed visits. Many more people turned up for the alumni event in Beijing than had registered so it was a bit hectic and after my speech there was very little time to eat or drink in between the numerous selfies. I met one of our inspirational new graduates, Liu Daming who has just completed his degree in Psychology. Daming has osteogenesis imperfecta, and is very well known in China (with millions of followers) because of his writings about his achievements and aspirations. He has won several awards, has met the President of China and is very keen to help disabled students. He spoke so warmly of the support he had received from staff and fellow students at our University.
Several University colleagues and I met the British Ambassador to China, Dame Barbara Woodward, and staff from the Embassy and the British Council to update them on our Chinese links and hear about UK-China partnerships from their perspective.
We visited the China Scholarship Council and were pleased by positive responses to our request for a significant increase in funded scholarships for PhD students.
We visited TusPark which is the largest science park in the world. It was spun out of Tsinghua University and now has activities across the world. We were shown round one of their incubator spaces by a Manchester graduate in engineering, then met the Chair, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and other senior staff. They are clearly very interested in having a presence in Manchester and will be visiting the University again soon.
At Tsinghua University, we met the University Chair, the Dean of Life Sciences and staff from their Faculty of Life Sciences and International Office to sign an agreement on joint PhD students in synthetic biology and discuss other areas of partnership. They gave me a photograph of The University of Manchester tree which I had planted on a previous visit to mark their 100th anniversary in 2011.
I also hosted a small dinner for senior alumni and met a potential investor in our research in two dimensional materials.
In Singapore, I attended a roundtable for universities, hosted by the British High Commissioner, Kara Owen, and took part in an ‘In Conversation’ event with Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov, at our fabulous new South East Asia Centre, which attracted many alumni, particularly MBA graduates.
In other separate meetings, University colleagues and I met the Executive Director of Keppel Marine (one of the largest companies in Singapore) and his colleagues, the CEO of the Singapore National Research Fund, the President of the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Executive Director of the Ministry of Health who was until recently President of NUS. Key areas of common interest were materials (particularly two dimensional materials), health (notably digital health, ageing and cancer), risk and social sciences.
We held an event to mark the fifteenth anniversary of our Singapore alumni association, which is now very active. The patron of the association, Senior Singaporean Minister Teo (who met his wife as a fellow student at the University), spoke of the importance of universities in these times of geopolitical turbulence, the British High Commissioner talked about strengthening UK-Singapore links, Alex Chan, current president of the association, commented on the activities of Singapore alumni and I thanked the leaders of the association and updated on recent developments at the University. Unfortunately I had to leave for the airport before the end of the quiz about Manchester which (perhaps not surprisingly) we were doing very well in.
On other important UK and University matters, we are holding an additional briefing meeting for Senate members on 27 September to discuss pensions with an independent expert who has not been involved in the Universities Superannuation Scheme discussions with any of the parties.
Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor