Upcoming external events

Digital researcher: Managing your networks and building your profile

The British Library and Vitae are running a one day event on 15 March 2010 exploring the use of Web 2.0 in research, networks and building researchers own profiles. This is being held at the British Library and is free for all postgraduate researchers and research staff. It will include presentations and interactive sessions on subjects such as microblogging, RSS feeds, social networking and social citation sharing.
More information and booking can be found on the Vitae site.

Careers in focus: Careers in academia

This one-day event is being held in Manchester on the 30th March. It is free for all postgraduate researchers, but a refundable deposit of £25 is required to secure a place.

The day will provide participants with an insight into some of the areas that make up a career in academia.

Participants have the opportunity to:

• meet with current academics from a range of disciplines to hear about their experiences of an academic career and ask the questions you've always wanted to, but weren't sure who to ask
• explore how to market yourself for a career in academia, both within your department, and at interview
• look at how to write effective grant/paper applications
• discover what life is like as a postdoctoral researcher
• work with fellow researchers and share experiences with other participants

More details and booking on the Vitae site.

Managing your Research Career - useful videos

On the University Affairs website (a Canadian site) there is a set of videos in which Jo Van Every, a PhD in sociology from the University of Essex and former program officer with the Standard Research Grants program at SSHRC, gives tips on prioritizing research tasks, planning a long-term program of research, developing a publication strategy, building a support network for research, and carving out time to do research in a busy, multi-focused position.

Junk the Jargon - The Final!

The final of the Junk the Jargon competition was last Wednesday, 27th Jan (apologies for the delay in posting this!), and I was really pleased with how well the whole event went. The ten finalists, who had three minutes each to entertain the audience by talking about their research, all did an amazing job, and on top of that we had a packed and appreciative audience, a panel of very experienced expert judges and generally a great atmosphere.



The winner was Claire Sarell from the School of Biological & Chemical Sciences, who entertained the audience with her talk "What causes Alzheimer's disease?". Runners-up were Katie Lidster, who used cuddly mouse models to illustrate her presentation on "How do mice with green eyes contribute to MS research?", and Rebecca Burgell who also used very inventive props in her delightfully titled talk "CODE BROWN/CODE RED!!! Causes of constipation".

More information about the event can be found on the QM news site, and a video of the event can be seen here.