Welcome to the Spring Issue of News Bites from the College of Science where you can find out some of the latest news and events. For more information about the College of Science visit www.swan.ac.uk/science

STUDENT ACTIVITIES / STUDENTS IN THE NEWS

Geography graduate wins prestigious prize

There’s never been a more important time to learn about the conservation of coral reefs

Biosciences student has paper accepted in peer-reviewed journal

Congratulations to Geography graduate Ifan Dafydd Jones who has won the 2016 Elsevier Prize for the best Physical Geography MSc dissertation.

The findings of Ifan’s dissertation entitled “ An investigation on the effects of Biochar and its application rate on pasture growth in comparison to Nitrogen fertiliser” will have a clear societal impact with the potential for practical implication.

Ifan is pictured here with Dr Iain Robertson, Head of the MSc in Environmental Dynamics and Climate Change.

Students from the Department of Biosciences recently embarked on a two week tropical marine biology study trip to Puerto Rico.

The purpose of the trip was to investigate the importance of marine habitats such as coral reefs, seagrass and mangroves concerning biodiversity and marine productivity.

The students were based at the Isla Magueyes, University of Puerto Rico and had many exciting opportunities such as snorkelling at night to experience the world famous Bioluminescent Bay, see bottle nose dolphins and use cutting-edge acoustic listening equipment to survey marine mammal populations.

Congratulations to Chris Dowle, a recent undergraduate biosciences student, who has had his 3rd year Literature Review accepted for publication in Bioscience Horizons, a peer-reviewed journal run by Oxford University Press.

Chris was praised by the editors for his “excellent and thorough job in addressing the reviewer’s comments” in his paper entitled “Faecal microbiota transplantation: a review of FMT as an alternative treatment for Clostridium difficile infection”

In addition, Chris has also subsequently won the 2016 Chair’s Prize for Best review article in the journal.

College of Science students win the Swansea heat of FameLab 2017

Two College of Science students went through to the FameLab regional round after winning the Swansea heats of the science communication competition.

Elizabeth Evans and Chloe Robinson, both PhD students, talked on “Debunking a few earthquake myths” and “eDNA: Catching Critters via Molecular Footprint.” 

FameLab is a communications competition designed to engage and entertain by breaking down science, technology and engineering concepts into three minute presentations.

Contestants from around the world take part armed only with their wits and a few props – the result is unpredictable and to encourage everyone taking part to find out about the latest research.

From left to right: Professor Matt Jones, Chloe Robinson and Elizabeth Evans.

Physics students get the CERN experience

A group of students from the Department of Physics recently visited CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.

During their stay, the group met with Professor Niels Madsen, one of the physicists from Swansea University who is heavily involved with antimatter research. The students were shown around the antimatter factory followed by a presentation by professor Madsen on the science behind his work.

They also had the opportunity to attend a presentation on the particle accelerators.

But the trip wasn’t all work - the group managed to squeeze in time for a game of darts, a visit to the famous jet d’eau and a traditional cheese fondue tasting session!

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & OUTREACH ACTIVITIES

Oriel Science shares research with the local community

Oriel Science is a public-facing exhibition and outreach teaching space showcasing exhibitions based on research from Swansea University’s College of Science. 

Oriel Science is excited to announce having over 10,000 visitors since September 2016 with over 60% of visitors having never visited either campus. This is an exciting on-going opportunity for Swansea University’s College of Science to interact and share research with the local community like never before. With school visits giving access to hundreds of students year 3 and above, Oriel science can help staff meet the needs of public engagement projects. 

Oriel Science opens on weekends and over half-terms, taking snapshots of University research, crafting them into compelling exhibits with the aim to engage, educate and enthuse. The current exhibition theme is The Story of Time, showcasing everything from glacial calving to a half-term sci-fi talk from Erik Stengler – with the DeLorean by the front door! 

Oriel Science hosted the launch of the Young Scientist Journal Hub with students from the Talent Bank at Gower College in January and has also been featured on The Wave following the excitement of the British Science Festival. 

With access to such a far-reaching audience, Oriel Science exhibitions can help deliver your project’s impact agenda, in an exciting, engaging and unique space. 

The Further Maths Support Programme hosts conferences for Year 12 students

Further Maths Support Programme Wales offers Year 9 Masterclasses

Over 300 students from across Wales participated in the conferences held in a University setting which promoted studying Maths at sixth form as a gateway to exciting University courses and a variety of careers. The conferences were held between December 2016 and February 2017.

As part of this event, 8 students from four South Wales schools attended two workshops; Making Connections delivered by Rebecca Cotton-Barratt, University of Oxford; Topical Geometry; Jeff Giansiracusa, Swansea University. The teachers who attended rated all talks/workshops as excellent, “Really engaging and pitched at the right level for the ‘brightest’ Year 12s”. All the students rated the day as good or excel-lent with 61% saying the content of the whole day was excellent.

The Further Maths Support Programme Wales was delighted to once again be able to offer Year 9 Maths Masterclasses.

The Royal Institution Year 9 Maths Masterclasses programme offered Mathematics Masterclasses to students from six schools in Swansea, Carmarthenshire and Neath Port Talbot with the support of the Mathematics Department, Swansea University. In addition, an extra programme for Year 10 girls covered a variety of topics, including a taste of the nature of Mathematical thinking behind ground breaking mathematics research.

RESEARCH IN THE NEWS

Computer Science Lecturer is awarded a Ser Cymru Fellowship

Research as Art 2017

De-scribing Worlds symposium in Japan

Congratulations to Dr Sean Walton, Department of Computer Science, who was recently awarded a Ser Cymru Fellowship. Sean will be working closely with Rolls Royce using data from 3-dimensional scans which will help in the development of components which could reduce the fuel consumption of aircraft.

Ser Cymru promotes the expertise that exists in Welsh academia. Sean joins a number of other academics across the College of Science who have also been awarded this prestigious fellowship.

Sean is pictured middle row, third from the left.

The 'Research as Art' Competition 2017 is now open with a deadline of 8th April 2017.
Research as Art gives the researcher, member of staff or student, an opportunity to capture the humanity and beauty of your research with both an image and a short narrative.

The competition is open to all staff and researchers from undergraduate to professor; studying, working or supporting research in any field or discipline. This includes Arts and Humanities, Engineering, Human and Health Sciences, Law, Medicine, Science and Management. Everything!

Image: “From anonymity to personality” by Gaelle Fehlmann, Department of Biosciences

Professor Marcus Doel, Department of Geography, presented a critique at the University of Tokyo, Japan earlier this year.

Professor Doel’s critique focussed on the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’, which supposedly heralds the fact that humanity has fundamentally altered the functioning of the Earth system and has thereby entered a new geological epoch of its own making.

The critique will be published in the book Earth Shatters: The Deleuzian Anthropocene, edited by Arun Saldanha and Hannah Stark, towards the end of the year.

Mathematicians on the move!

Dr Gibin Powathil has recently visited Tsinghua Sanya International Mathematical Forum, Sanya, China as an invited participant and speaker in a week long Mathematical Modelling and Computation in Medicine/Biology Workshop and delivered a lecture on his recent research in Mathematical Oncology. 

This workshop aimed to bring together an international group of mathematicians, computational and biomedical scientists working in the interdisciplinary field of mathematics, scientific computing and medicine/biology to exchange ideas on topics spanning a broad spectrum of problems of current and emerging interests in biology and medicine.

For the spring of 2017 the Mittag-Leffler Institute has been running a semester of research activities in the area of Motivic Homotopy Theory, and the organisers invited Dr Grigory Garkusha to join them in January and February. Experts from around the world will join together in this beautiful (but rather cold) location to collaborate and discuss their latest findings. 

Dr Vitaly Moroz was a visiting professor in Osaka Prefecture University (Japan) for four weeks in December 2016 – January 2017.

The research visit took place in the framework of the Special Guest Professor Programme where leading researchers and educators are invited to OPU throughout the year to conduct special lectures, seminars, and individual discussions with faculty and students. Vitaly gave two lecture courses for postgraduate and undergraduate students. The visit also incorporated two research seminars on the topics of his research and as well as participation in a research workshop at Tohoku University (Sendai) and a number of fruitful research discussions with colleagues working in the area of nonlinear PDEs. Possibilities for future student and staff exchanges between Swansea and OPU were explored.

Dendro-glaciology in Japan

In February 2017, Dr John Hiemstra and Dr Iain Robertson, of the Department of Geography, were awarded £7k by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation for a dendro-glaciology project that will look into recent climate change in Japan.

They will be collaborating with Dr Kotaro Fukui of the Tateyama Caldera Sabo Museum, who recently discovered small glaciers in the northern Japanese Alps on Honshu. Until a few years ago it was thought that Japan did not have active glaciers, and that the nearest glacierised region in this part of Asia was the Kamchatka Peninsula, several hundred kilometres to the north.

The project will involve glaciological and tree-ring research, and will make use of glacial geomorphological field mapping, analysis of meteorological data and satellite imagery, and densitometric and stable isotope analyses of tree-cores sampled in the subalpine zone just below the suspected glaciers.

Mathematician visits Australia

In November 2016, Dr Elaine Crooks, Mathematics (far right), gave an invited talk at the `International conference on nonlinear partial differential equations: A celebration of Professor Norman Dancer’s 70th birthday’ that was held at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia. Professor Dancer (second from the right) is a Swansea University Distinguished Research Professor and Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney. Elaine’s presentation in Armidale was on the topic of invasion speeds in competition-diffusion models with mutation and based on joint work with Dr Luca Börger, Department of Biosciences, and Aled Morris, Department of Mathematics, who is currently working on an interdisciplinary PhD. Her trip to Australia also included a research visit to the University of Sydney to pursue a collaborative project with Professor Dancer and Dr Daniel Hauer, University of Sydney, on strong competition limits of competition-diffusion systems. 

Mathematics hosts a 2-day international workshop on Mathematical Medicine and Pharmacology

The Department of Mathematics hosted a 2-day workshop on Mathematical Medicine and Pharmacology from 2 to 3 February 2017. The topics of the workshop spanned on a broad spectrum of problems of current interest in oncology, pharmacology and cardiac modelling, and invited talks were delivered by several national and international experts in these research areas. This multidisciplinary workshop brought together more than 30 researchers from the UK and abroad, drawn from a variety of disciplines including mathematics, experimental biology, medicine, and engineering, to discuss some of the key problems and challenges in medicine and pharmacology where modelling can be of great help. 

This was the 1st session of the BioMathematics@Swansea 2017 event, organised under the umbrella of the Centre for Biomathematics, Swansea University. The organisers of the workshop were Gibin Powathil, Lloyd Bridge, and Elaine Crooks from Mathematics. More information and abstracts of the talks can be found at the webpage: https://mathmedworkshop1.wordpress.com/. The 2nd session of BioMathematics@Swansea 2017 will focus on Mathematical Ecology and take place on 27th-28th April 2017. These events are generously supported by an LMS conference grant, the Swansea University College of Science, and the EPSRC-funded network POEMS (Predictive mOdelling for hEalthcare through MathS).

Inspiring Women - Mathematician Sofya Lyakhova

As part of the University International Women’s Day celebrations, each week during March the University will showcase a range of successful and inspiring women that work, study and support Swansea University.

Since joining Swansea, Sofya has created and led the Further Mathematics Support Programme for Wales. This began as a pilot project in South Wales, providing support to gifted Mathematics students who wanted to take Further Mathematics at AS or A level, but whose schools could not provide sufficient support for this. Under Sofya’s guidance FMSP(W) has always sought to provide broader support, helping gifted students with A level Mathematics, and up-skilling teachers so that they feel more confident delivering the whole Mathematics syllabus. In 2016 the tremendous success of this pilot was recognised by the Welsh Government with a decision to roll the programme out across the whole of Wales, under Sofya’s continuing leadership. 

TEACHING DEVELOPMENTS

Professor Simon Bott becomes co-head of the new Chemistry Department

Dr Kevin Rees visits Hong Kong

Professor Simon Bott, originally from the UK, has won awards for his work at the University of Houston and has published extensively in the fields of organic and inorganic structural chemistry and molecular recognition.

Over the past decade, Professor Bott has been the recipient of eight awards for his instructional teaching, advising and faculty member excellence. These include a "Piper Professor", only ten of which are awarded a year across the entire state of Texas, covering every discipline and every further and higher education institution.

Last October, Dr Rees embarked on a recruitment trip to Hong Kong where he visited six schools. 

The talks were extremely well received and the trip was very successful, forging new contacts with three schools and deepening the relationship with schools visited the previous year.

Dr Nelly Villamizar joins the Department Mathematics

Dr Pawel Dlotko joins the Mathematics Department

Before coming to Swansea, Nelly spent 4 years at the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (RICAM), Austrian Academy of Sciences as a postdoctoral researcher in the Symbolic Computation group in Linz, Austria. Nelly did her bachelor studies in Mathematics at the National University of Colombia, Bogota, and her Master degree at the Leiden University, the Netherlands and at the University of Bordeaux, France. Nelly wrote her PhD thesis at Oslo University, Norway, 2013. Her research interests are applied algebraic geometry, and commutative algebra, in particular, their applications for solving problems arising in Geometric Modelling and Computer Aided Geometric Design (CAGD).

Nelly is currently teaching Groups and Rings to Year 2 (FHEQ Level 5).

Pawel graduated in 2012 from Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. Since then, he has worked at Jagiellonian University (Poland), University of Pennsylvania (USA) and Inria Saclay (France). His work involves topological methods to solve practical problems in engineering, material and life sciences and in computer science. Working in between Mathematics and Computer Science he is developing various public domain libraries for computational topology.

Pawel is currently teaching Computational Methods (with MatLab) to Year 1 (FHEQ Level 4).

COFUND Research Fellow joins Mathematics

China Scholarship Council supports academic visitor to Mathematics

Dr Jianhai Bao from Central South University, China has moved to the Mathematics Department as a COFUND research fellow funded by Strengthening International Research Capacity in Wales (SIRCIW) and Swansea University. The SIRCIW Fellowship programme is a postdoctoral fellowship scheme part funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions COFUND scheme. He is working with Professor Fen-Yu Wang  on the project “Functional Stochastic Differential Equations and Applications to Natural Systems”.

Dr Li Tan, from Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, China. She was awarded her PhD degree from Central South University in 2010, she worked in Central South University for 4 years as a Lecturer, and from December 2014 she has been working in Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics as an associate professor. Now, she is supported by China Scholarship Council as an academic visitor in Swansea University working within the Mathematics Department.

OTHER NEWS AND EVENTS

Construction starts on Wales’ stunning new £31million Computational Foundry

Construction work is underway at Swansea University’s new £450m Bay Campus to build a massive new state-of-the-art centre to house a vibrant and growing community of world-class research leaders drawn from computational and mathematics sciences, who work together with purpose and impact; making Wales a global destination for researchers, students, and industrial partners.

The £31m Computational Foundry, part of the University’s College of Science, is expected to be completed in summer 2018.  The transformational development, which is backed with £17m from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), is the next stage of the University’s ambitious plans to expand and develop world-class facilities as part of its Campus Development strategy.

'Thinking and Feeling Migration Differently' event

Dr Angharad Closs Stephens, Department of Geography, will be taking part in an event at Tate Modern Switch House, London, on 'Thinking and Feeling Migration Differently', 15 March. It is a collaboration between the Dead Reckoning art project by Bern O'Donoghue and the Crossing the Med research project led by Dr Vicki Squire, University of Warwick. Speakers include academics, artists, documentary photographers and practitioners from charities and social justice movements.

Computational Foundry Away Day event

The Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics marked the start of the Computational Foundry with an Away Day on 9 Jan 2017.  In a series of stimulating talks, we highlighted research opportunities for collaboration between Computer Science and Mathematics, and beyond.  The event made it clear that the Computational Foundry is much more than a building, it is a community striving for doing work leading computational research, creating a beacon for computational sciences.  The day ended on Bay Campus shortly before the Graduation Ceremony, with the cutting of a "Computational Foundry Cake".

For further details on any item reported above, please contact the member of staff concerned, or email Anna Ratcliffe