Research and Impact @ Manchester (Summer 2024)
16 Jul 2024
A message from Professor Colette Fagan, Vice-President for Research
Dear colleagues,
Welcome to our last edition of Research and Impact @ Manchester for the academic year.
There is much to be proud of this year and your achievements have been celebrated in this, our new format newsletter delivered direct to inboxes across the research community, and to our wider University community through StaffNet News.
In June, we celebrated our performance in the Times Higher Education (THE) Impact Rankings. We’ve retained our top spot in the UK and Europe and are 2nd in the world, and we’re the only institution in the world to rank in the top ten for social and environmental impact every year. Our research plays a huge part in this as we identify and address global challenges.
A good example is our work to address health inequalities, with our investment in and the creation of a new platform – do get involved if your work is relevant. Funding bodies and industry partners see our impact and want to work with us, hence Sir Terry Leahy’s £1.5m gift for regional inequality research.
Other examples include research teams who took away a Making a Difference Award in a very special year, our Bicentenary, celebrating 200 years of positive impact on the world. Their stories are told in the Our people section of this edition.
Four of our Professors – Ian Hall, Richard Wakeford, Paul Klapper and Paul Howarth – have been recognised for their extraordinary contributions and service in the King’s Birthday Honours, while Jamie Woodward has been named one of the most impactful environmental professionals in the UK in The ENDS Report Power List 2024 and Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, Michael Garrett, has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of his “invaluable contributions to science”.
On a personal note, I was proud to record a Talk 200 podcast, part of a lecture and podcast series to mark our bicentenary. I spoke with two students, Aisha Akram and George Obolo about fairness and equality. We discussed the importance of equality, diversity and inclusion in higher education and society more broadly. We also considered how equality and fairness has advanced at the University and through our research, and how we might accelerate progress. We spoke about the work still required to bring to fruition a fairer world for all. It won’t all be solved in my lifetime; but I hope it’s solved in theirs.
The University is proud of your work and is here to support you in your endeavours. Our support includes the University-wide Innovation Academy, here to help you access knowledge, expertise and an entrepreneurial community to enable you to commercialise your research. It also includes our research beacons, five pillars of excellence bringing our research community together and showcasing your amazing work, which have recently refreshed their website – please take a look. And we have been selected to join the Next Generation Research Supervision Project (RSVP), one of the largest collaborative, cross-disciplinary research projects into doctoral education ever funded, which aims to transform the culture and practice of research supervision, as part of a consortium with the University of Salford and Manchester Metropolitan University.
It is in this spirit that we look forward to another year of achievement and impact. In the meantime, I hope you all have some well-deserved rest, or maybe adventures, over the summer, ready to start afresh in the next academic year.
Colette