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

Student research recognised by the Microbiology Society

Mathematics student to represent Wales

Anna Rawlings, a PhD student in the Department of Biosciences, supervised by Professor Dan Eastwood, recently attended the Society's Annual Conference in Edinburgh.

Anna presented a poster on pioneer fungi which was selected for special focus.

Scott Jenkins, a Mathematics Year 1/FHEQ level 4, has been selected to represent Wales at the forthcoming Junior World Cup in Georgia. The Department of Mathematics and the College of Science wish him well.

Robotic Challenge!

Best Physics Society in the UK

Computer Science student has publication accepted

Mabrouka Abuhmida, a tutor in the Department of Computer Science recently organised the Robotic Challenge with the support of Professor Arnold Beckmann (HoD) and Associate Professor Monika Seisenberger (Programme Director). Using only lego boxes and computers, the 32 students managed to design and programme the robots to battle and solve puzzles all in 5 hours!

Physics students from Swansea University have come up trumps by claiming the top prize for their efforts and commitment to the University’s Physics Society. A delighted Swansea University Physics Society President, Adam Powell, said “The focus of our activities includes improving our members’ employability, encouraging strong engagement with our academic-partnered events, as well as maintaining a good social calendar, for example, the annual Physics Ball and trip to CERN.

Computer Science PhD student Liam McNabb recently had  a paper accepted to the EuroVis2017 conference titled "Survey of Surveys (SoS) - Mapping The Landscape of Survey Papers in Information Visualisation".  The paper acts as the first paper surveying other survey papers as a focus which allows for a more concise look at an entire landscape of research. It is hoped that the paper will be a guide to the current landscape of visualisation.

New York City Field course 2017

37 students and 3 staff set off on the New York City field course in early April.  Over the course of 6 days in the city they explored themes of Gentrification; Migration and Multiculturalism; and Power in the Urban Landscape.  They visited iconic sites including Wall Street, the 9/11 Museum, Times Square, Grand Central Station, and Central Park – as well as less touristy areas like the East Village, Williamsburg and parts of Harlem. Students worked independently on group projects and had plenty of leisure time to explore the city and everything it has to offer.  They even managed to squeeze in a group visit to the New York Mets versus Miami Marlins baseball match, played in what felt like sub-zero temperatures.  The free t-shirts came in handy as an extra layer!  Planning for next year’s trip is already well under way.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & OUTREACH ACTIVITIES

Swansea Science Festival 2017

Swansea University is to showcase its inspiring research to the people of Swansea as it launches a brand new free festival in the city for September.

The Swansea Science Festival, which will be on 8th-10th September 2017 will be hosted by the University’s festival partner the National Waterfront Museum.  Activities will also take place in Swansea Museum, encompassed within the Museum Maritime Quarter. The action will kick off with an evening event on Friday 8th September aimed at adults followed by a weekend of family events.

College of Science staff give Ted Talks at TEDx events

The TEDx program helps communities, organizations and individuals produce TED-style events at a local level. TED is a nonprofit making community devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks, from science to business to global issues, in more than 100 languages.

TEDx London

TEDx Swansea

Dr Richard Smith was an invited speaker at the London event on June 4th and gave a talk on ‘London after Brexit' to an audience of 1600 people at the historic Sadler Wells theatre. The theme for this year's event was 'Confidence'.

Dr Andrew King, Department of Biosciences, will be giving a talk later this month on the theme 'Evolve' focusing on the origins and evolution of teamwork and leadership. The event will take place at the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea on 24th June.

Robotics World Festival 2017

A robotics Technoclub at Ysgol Gyfun Emlyn, Carmarthenshire has been invited to represent the UK in the annual FIRST® Robotics World Festival taking place in St Louis USA at the end of April. Team Lightning is delighted to be the very first Welsh team to represent the UK in the 25-year history of the Robotics World Festival. Ysgol Gyfun Emlyn’s Robotics journey started back in 2012 when the Assistant Head teacher, Mrs Sarah Thomas, attended a Technocamps teacher briefing to learn about the Technocamps Robotics Competition. From L-R: Joseph Stadius, Edward Upton, Ben Dodd.

Oriel Science attracts over 15,000 public visitors

Oriel Science is Swansea University’s new public-facing exhibition centre, born in the College of Science, which showcases our research to the community.

Our exhibitions are accessible, informative and interactive. We take visitors on a journey through a scientific theme, ignite their curiosity, and leave a lasting legacy in their imagination. We encourage younger visitors to choose STEMM subjects at school and University and further develop the scientific literacy of older visitors.

We opened our city centre pop-up venue in September 2016 and have attracted over 15,000 public visitors and nearly 1,000 students on organised school trips. Around half of our visitors have never set foot on a Swansea University campus confirming our role as a conduit between the University and the community.

Our first exhibition theme, The Story of Time, welcomed visitors with a “Back to the Future” DeLorean sports car and a mock-up of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Further inside exhibits include a video of a Greenland glacial calving event, displays of tree rings used for climate studies and a simulation of time dilation near black holes. A 30 metre “time wall” shows an animated history of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present day, and a “future wall” allows visitors to write their thoughts for the future.

Maths at the Eisteddfod!

Swansea University has again sponsored the Science pavilion at the national Urdd Eisteddfod, and the Mathematics Department and FMSP Wales are proud to have again taken part in this important national event. This year the Maes was at Pencoed near Bridgend. Staff and students from the Department manned the “Mathematical Circus” which includes a range of activities and interactive demonstrations of mathematical ideas for 3 days. This years activities included demonstrations of the latest research into cancer modelling, image processing and probability theory. The “Mathematical Circus” will be open again at the Swansea Science festival which will take place at the National Waterfront Museum on 8-10th September.

RESEARCH IN THE NEWS

£3.5 Millions Supercomputing Grant Awarded to Mathematics Professor

Geographies of Violence

As the Swansea Principal investigator of Supercomputing Wales, Professor Biagio Lucini, Head of Mathematics, has been awarded by the Welsh European Funding Office (WEFO) a grant of £3.5M to further develop and sustain High Performance Computing research activities at Swansea University. 

Supercomputing Wales is a strategic programme of investment in Higher Education intended to change the way supercomputer facilities are used to support research activities in Wales. The programme is a collaboration involving Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff and Swansea Universities, and the company HPC Wales Ltd. 

Professor Marcus Doel, Department of Geography, has written Geographies of Violence: Killing Space, Killing Time, a text for human geography students and researchers alike.  The book is a comprehensive and international coverage of the history of violence, examining topics such as natural disasters and genocide and has been described as a “stunning work of apocalyptic beauty”.

Dr Emily Shepard is awarded Starter grant

Dr Emily Shepard has been awarded a €2 million ERC Starter grant to investigate how wind and other airflows affect the costs of flight in birds. The “FLIGHT” project, which began in April, involves building a unique wind tunnel at Swansea. Birds will be trained to fly in this tunnel in order to make new measurements of the energy required to fly. The FLIGHT team will then use miniature loggers to estimate the costs of flight in the wild, and how these change depending on the precise flight paths taken by birds, and the weather on a given day. The project will bring together meteorologists, physiologists, physicists and engineers in order to help us predict how flying animals might be affected by changing wind conditions.

Most cited mathematics article

An article by Dr Vitaly Moroz, Department of Mathematics, on Choquard equations (joint work with Jean Van Shaftingen, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) is featured on Elsevier website as the No 1 most cited article published in the prestigious "Journal of Functional Analysis" since 2012. 

The article, published in 2013, provides optimal conditions for the existence of solutions to the Choquard equation, which is used for modelling of boson stars and also features in Roger Penrose's "The Road to Reality" as a model for wave-function collapse.

TEACHING DEVELOPMENTS

Biosciences Degree Accreditation success!

Most highly-cited research is now on the curriculum

Mathematics Talk at Louvain-la-Neuve

Swansea University has received Royal Society of Biology Accreditation in recognition of their outstanding bioscience degree programmes. Swansea University has received accreditation status for six of their biosciences programmes in recognition of the quality biosciences education they deliver. 

Dr Richard Smith’s research on world city networks is the highest cited in the world and is now on the AS and A Level Geography syllabus.

Dr Carlo Mercuri, Department of Mathematics, gave a talk entitled ‘On a class of interpolation inequalities involving Coulomb-Sobolev norms of radial functions’ during May 2017 at the Nonlinear Analysis day at Louvain-la-Neuve, Brussels.

Final year Mathematics students present their projects

In May, final year Mathematics students presented their projects to staff, with topics including: Hypergeometric Functions, Universal Constructions in Category Theory, Modelling Avascular Tumour Growth and Treatments, Comparing Confidence Intervals in Statistics, Polynomials of Binomial Type and Randoms Walks and Ruin Theory.

Once again Quantum Advisory, Cardiff, the Actuaries and Employee Benefit Consultants will be awarding the ‘Quantum Advisory Prize of £1000 for the most original contribution to Mathematics’.

Mathematics Top in Wales!

Once again the strengths of the Mathematics department have been recognised by the Guardian University League Table, this year placing us as the top Mathematics department in Wales, and 18th in the whole of the UK. This high placing is partly due to our excellent employment record - only 6 maths departments in the UK have more of their students in graduate-level jobs or further study within six months of graduation. And our student satisfaction also helped: 94.1% of our students said they were satisfied with their course - exactly the same figure as at Cambridge University.

The Department of Computer Science has also been recognised by the Guardian University Guide 2018 as being TOP in the UK for career prospects and 5th in the UK overall and TOP in Wales, Times & Sunday Times University Guide 2017. The Department of Physics has also been ranked TOP in the UK for reasearch intensity, Complete University Guide 2018.

Dr Amanda Rogers receives prestigious award

Physics Professor leads successful bid

The Dillwyn Medal for Outstanding Early Career Research in the Creative Arts and Humanities was presented to Dr Amanda Rogers, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Swansea University. This was in recognition of her research on the geographies of the performing arts, particularly theatre. Dr Rogers said: “It is rare to receive this level of public recognition for your research and I hope that this acts as inspiration for other young researchers.”

In collaboration with colleagues from the universities of Bristol and Cardiff, Professor Simon Hands has led a successful bid to the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to establish a Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Intensive Science.

The CDT, which has had generous support from Swansea University and colleagues across the College of Science, will initially recruit 14 Ph.D. students in STEM-related areas across the three universities, working principally on projects in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology. The cohort will enjoy a distinctive shared portfolio of advanced courses and training opportunities in data science techniques, and at a later stage each student will undertake a six-month placement with an external partner organisation in industrial, commercial or public sectors applying the data skills they have learned. The studentships, each of 4 years duration, are due to start in October 2017.

OTHER NEWS AND EVENTS

International Women's Day

Alice Gray talks about challenging stereotypes

Women in Tech BT Event

Monster Confidence Conference

As part of International Women’s Day, the Department of Computer Science and the College of Science celebrated by inviting guest speaker Alice Gray to talk about ‘STEMing the flow of women out of science’. Alice is a STEMinist and blogger, who’s been breaking down the barriers for women in STEM by shaping public policy, challenging stereotypes and raising the profile of women working in industry. Alice was named on the BBC’s list of 100 inspirational women for 2015.

Associate Professor and Programme Director Monika Seisenberger and Mabrouka Abuhmida, Department of Computer Science, had the opportunity to take 13 future female computer scientists to visit one of the biggest communication companies -  BT.

BT is an inclusive employer which shares common values with Swansea University, such as equality and diversity. The company has a reputation for encouraging and celebrating difference and are keen to attract talented female graduates difference. Students were invited to an open-day for future female software developers and gained a first-hand insight into the company and culture.This was the first ever event of its kind that BT organised and they have promised many more!

The Monster Confidence event was a superb opportunity for 16 female students from the Department of Computer Science to be inspired by the range of speakers and their shared experiences at this years event in Cardiff.

This annual conference is hosted by various cities throughout the UK and has one simple goal – to give a dose of Monster Confidence to the UK’s young women in STEM. The trip was organised by Monika Seisenberger and Mabrouka Abuhmida, Department of Computer Science.

Dr Xiaozhi Zhang visits Swansea Mathematics

Animal Collectives collaboration

Dr Xiaozhi Zhang, from Jiujiang University, China is an academic visitor supported by China Scholarship Council to Swansea University working within Mathematics She was awarded her PhD degree from Nanchang University in 2014 where she worked for 10 years as an assistant and lecturer From June 2016 she has been working in Jiujiang University as an associate professor. 

Drs Ines Fürtbauer and Andrew King, Department of Biosciences, are hosting Artist in Residence, Heather Barnett, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence grant. The Animal Collectives collaboration combines data visualisation, experiential learning and social engagement to make connections between the social behaviour of humans and other animals. By exploring patterns of foraging, navigation and cooperation the project aims to create experiences and artworks which immerse the participant or viewer within a different realm of collective existence.

Centre for Biomathematics hosts a two-day Workshop on Mathematical Ecology

The College of Science Centre for Biomathematics hosted a very successful 2-day workshop on Mathematical Ecology on 27-28 April 2017. This interdisciplinary meeting brought together more than 40 researchers from the UK and abroad, with participants drawn from mathematics, statistics, and ecology backgrounds. The topics of the workshop spanned a broad spectrum of problems of current interest in mathematical ecology, with interesting talks on movement ecology, population dynamics and spatial ecology, and biodiversity and community ecology.

The workshop was organised by Luca Börger, Department of Biosciences, and Elaine Crooks, Department of Mathematics, and was supported by the London Mathematical Society and the College of Science. More information and the abstracts of the talks can be found at the webpage https://mathbioworkshop1.wordpress.com

Positive lives through education

IT equipment donated by the College of Science to IT Schools Africa is now being put to great use and is transforming education at schools throughout Zambia. IT Schools Africa is a UK-registered charity that not only helps to improve education in Africa but supported UK back to work employment and training agencies and other charities.

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