Academic Schools and DepartmentsBiology

This biology postgraduate career session will feature discussions around the challenges of finding a job in sciences while balancing a family life.

The event will include a diverse panel of speakers, academics and non academics, who will talk about personal experiences and offer suggestions on how to find the optimal balance between a rewarding job and a stable family life.

The panel of speakers includes:

• Dr Christopher Stockdale, Clinical Scientist at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
• Dr Katie Gillies, Health Care Assessment Programme Director & Senior Research Fellow, University of Aberdeen
• Julie McLellan, Career Adviser, University Careers Center
• Professor Maria Dornelas, School of Biology
• Dr Nicholas Jones, Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of Biology

Each speaker will give a ten-minute presentation followed by five-minutes for questions. At the end of the session there will be a round table discussion. The event will run on a dual mode: most talks will be live but some will be online via MS Teams.

Please register for the event using this online form.

Dr Furaha Asani will be joining the School of Biology to give this talk titled ‘Social responsibility in Science’, followed by a Q&A session and all staff and students are welcome to attend.

Furaha is a public academic, mental health advocate, precarious migrant, and writer with interest in the themes of global health equity, a world without borders, digital placemaking, liberatory STEM pedagogy, and science in pop culture.

She has written for several platforms including The Guardian, The Independent, Forbes.com, Medium, Star Trek, Huffpost and many others. Currently Furaha is Research Lead at Watershed, part of the team at The Free Black University, and co-chair of Wellcome Connecting Science’s Community Advisory Panel.

Registration link for event.

Internal University audience

Registration for the Fellowship Day hosted by the BSRC and IBANS is now open.

The event brings together external funders, current fellowship holders and colleagues from a range of Units who support the submission of fellowship applications.

There will be a CV surgery, where small groups will discuss CVs with a senior member of academic staff, time for Q&As, and the opportunity to meet with one of the funders via individual appointments.

This event will be of particular interest to PhD students and PDRAs, but anyone is welcome to attend. Please register at this link where you will find the full agenda for the day.

The ‘Evidence-Based Policy’ symposium is coordinated by the St Andrews Global Challenges Forum.

The St Andrews Global Challenges Forum was formed in 2018 and builds on the University’s commitment to the Global Challenges agenda. The forum supports the University’s extensive Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) challenge-led research base, funded by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) GCRF QR Grant, and contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Chaired by Professor Thomas Meagher, this symposium is part of symposia webinar series on the overarching theme of ‘Sustainable Futures’ with the cross-cutting impact topics of:

• Equality Matters
• Sustainable Livelihoods
• Social Justice
• Evidence-based policy

Our vision for these themed sessions is that each will consist of two to three paired talks from St Andrews researchers and their ODA partners, followed by a panel presentation and discussion.

These topics are applicable to the SFC-funded GCRF projects portfolio as underlying issues are being addressed with more discipline-specific research. We intend that they will form the basis for substantive interdisciplinary discussions.

Find out more about GCRF on Facebook or Twitter.  For further information, please email RIS_GCRF@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Talk title: Cancer Screening as a Public Health Policy Challenge.

As part of its contract to install the D’Arcy Thompson Simulator @ Eden Campus, using funding from the Tay Cities Deal, St Andrews has been enrolled in the United for Smart, Sustainable Cities programme. This has over 100 metrics as ‘key performance indicators’ for benchmarking and improvement purposes — but are these the right ones? In this online meeting, the evaluation work done to date will be shared and the SIMULATION-LED methodology to support ‘the rapid implementation of innovation and change in balance with Nature explained.

Moya Crawford (Managing Director D’Arcy Thompson Simulator Centre) has worked in the marine and offshore world for over forty years, combining hands-on experience in onsite operations, with positions at executive level. Her core background is the marine salvage industry.

In 1998 she founded Deep Tek Limited and since 2006 she has concentrated on taking innovative technology, developed for specialist cargo recovery, into the oil and gas sector. This, in particular, has led to a long strong collaboration with the Norwegian classification society, DNV on the assurance and certification of new technology. Proof of this was the sale of the world’s first, two, synthetic filament rope cranes (110t in air/110t @ 3000m) embodying a patented Deep Tek winch design, with Deep Tek acting as system integrator for the ground-break, principles-based standard, DNVGL-ST-E407.

This Northern North Sea/North East Atlantic relationship was further strengthened in 2015, with the formation of Deep Tek AS in the Møre & Romsdal district of mid Norway; which, in turn, has led to the world-leading developments of the Offshore Simulator Centre in Ålesund (a spin-out from NTNU, the National Science and technology University of Norway) being brought to the University of St Andrews’ Eden Campus, as a demonstrator for a large scale, fully immersive sphere.

Moya, is leading this initiative, as Managing Director of the D’Arcy Thompson Simulator Centre Limited, a joint venture with St Andrews Applied Research (StAAR) Ltd. The Company’s niche activity is the rapid implementation of innovation and change in balance with Nature.

Carol is a leading figure in figure in academic public health from whom we have much to learn as she leads a cross University, multi school institute not dissimilar to what we seek to achieve with Mackenzie.

In the 1970s and 80s, when menstruation was generally considered taboo, artist Jay Critchley made art out of discarded plastic tampon applicators washed up and collected on local beaches. With no idea what the items were used for, Critchley could not have known that his curiosity would lead to a decades-long quest to understand and improve issues surrounding menstrual product waste.

Critchley did not succeed legislatively, but his artworks document a history of protest through creativity and solidarity nonetheless. It is a timely story that predates the current interest in menstrual environmentalism by decades, linking the contemporary movement to a history of collective action against marine debris, consumer boycott, and protest against corporations. Based on interviews with the artist and visual analysis of his archive, this paper presents Critchley’s ‘environmenstrual’ works in an art historical light for the first time.

Dr Camilla Mørk Røstvik is Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Art History at the University of Aberdeen. She is Honorary Research Fellow at St Andrews and the PI of the Menstruation Research Network UK, funded by the Wellcome Trust.

With COP26 just completed, many countries around the globe have made commitments to decarbonise their economies. The route chosen usually involves the use of ‘renewable’ energies such as wind turbines / electric vehicles and one repeatedly sees phrases such as ‘zero-emission’ or ‘carbon-free’ associated with these technologies. Adrian Finch’s talk will look more critically at two consequences of these commitments and challenge some of the assumptions behind them. First, each wind turbine contains about half a tonne of the metal neodymium (Nd), of which 90%+ of global demand is mined in China. Of the ore, Nd constitutes 0.1% which means that for the 500 kg in each magnet, 500+ tonnes of rock were mined, crushed and processed using diesel-driven vehicles and coal-fired power. Second, the sudden increases in demand for critical metal resources that the world’s economies would require to fulfil their pledges is unattainable unless many more critical metal mines are opened. Adrian Finch will review the geological resources available to Europe plus the solutions that will need to be implemented to ensure Europe is successful as a producer of critical resources.

Adrian Finch is Professor of Geology at the University of St Andrews, specialising in mineralogy, petrology and geochemistry of rift-related magmas. His research focusses on describing the mineral deposits which form in rift environments, which include rare earths, niobium and tantalum. He works by explaining the shape and grade of the deposit and by developing models of how they formed. He has worked on alkaline rocks from all over the world (Mongolia to Malawi to Greenland) with a particular reputation for fieldwork in the Arctic.