May message from Juup Stelma, Interim SEED Head of School

30 May 2025

A month of marking demands, promotions, awards and events

Dear all,  

This month’s eNews reports on a wide range of teaching, research, scholarship, EDI and social responsibility activity. It is remarkable how SEED staff and students can achieve so much, seemingly all at the same time. 

As it’s the end of the second semester, many of you are now busy with marking, and I’d like to thank you all for your continued hard work to meet deadlines. I want to acknowledge how this also includes responding to an increase in the number of extension requests coming from our students. This is a sector-wide challenge as we become more attentive to individual students' needs and work towards being more inclusive. Finding the right balance between being inclusive and remaining timely is not easy. We will continue to seek better ways to balance the many demands upon us. 

This month, we concluded the yearly promotions round. Congratulations to those who have been promoted from Grade 6 to 7, to senior Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow, to Reader and to Chair. Not all applications for promotion are successful, and we recognise the disappointment and frustration this can cause. We are striving to ensure equal opportunity and are preparing for the next promotions round much sooner this year, with promotion's workshops taking place this summer (June 25th for Grades 7 and 8 and July 10th for Reader and Chair). Hopefully this will encourage us to spend more time on writing applications and it gives departments more time to support this process. 

We have even more to celebrate with recent award wins. Among the successes, we congratulate Miri Firth for winning an Academic Award for her outstanding teaching for employability, Bo Murphy, our SEED Student Representative, took home the Education Officer Award, Niki Banks for winning a Making a Difference Award for her outstanding contribution to social and environmental impact through entrepreneurship, and Melissa Markauskas, who has won the first SEED Debra Whitehead Award for Service Excellence.  

I’d also like to highlight the efforts that go into our SEED events. Last Wednesday we had the fantastic SEED PGR conference brilliantly put together by PGRs and this year including participants from beyond SEED (see Tanja’s message for more on this). Then on Thursday and Friday we had the thought-provoking Sustainability Symposium organised by Heather Alberro and the Sustainability@SEED working group. I was able to attend this myself and I enjoyed meeting and talking to staff and students from across the university and beyond. These events spark the interdisciplinary understanding and connections we need going into the future.  

Now summer is drawing closer. The university will stay open over the summer, but it will still be a bit quieter, and I do hope we all can slow down ever so slightly and reflect on our many achievements this past year. There is an opportunity to do this together at our SEED Summer Social, details of which will soon be announced. 

Best wishes,  

Juup