Margaret Low, Principal Teaching Fellow at WMG, has been awarded a Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence, granted by the University of Warwick to recognise excellent teaching and support for learning across its faculty.

Margaret was selected from a record number of nominations made in 2013/14 and was presented with her award at the University’s 2014 summer graduation ceremony. The award nominations are made by colleagues or students who wish to recognise and celebrate excellence in teaching throughout the nominee’s career at the University.

A key factor in Margaret’s award was her leadership of and contribution to Outreach and student support activities at the University. Margaret is a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) ambassador and Widening Participation officer at WMG and works with colleagues and students across the University’s Faculty of Science to encourage programmes which promote interest in STEM. She founded the highly successful Warwick Technology Volunteers programme for students across the University and continues to provide the academic leadership and coaching required for the student volunteers and their projects in the community.

Margaret Low, Principal Teaching Fellow at WMG, has won an award in the University of Warwick's Research Impact and Public Engagement Awards.

The awards were announced by the Provost, Stuart Croft, and Pro-Vice-Chancellors Simon Swain and Christina Hughes on Thursday 3 July. Staff and PG students, from across the University gathered in the Physics Concourse at a reception to hear the winners announced.

These awards recognise staff for the time, hard work and consideration they put into engaging the public with the benefits of their research, and to recognise the myriad ways in which all staff and students at the University engage with local communities and businesses to improve people’s lives – in the region, in the UK and globally. Margaret won the award for her public engagement work with the Technology Volunteers.

Technology Volunteers are a group of students and staff at the University of Warwick who aim to encourage children to become creators, rather than consumers of technology. They offer support to local schools by assisting with technology-based projects and activities during lessons, or at after school clubs. They run a number of technology-based workshops with schools and community organisations in Coventry and Warwickshire.

Monday 23rd June 2014 is National Women in Engineering Day. The aim of the day is to raise the profile and celebrate the achievements of women in engineering, and encourage more girls to consider engineering as a career.

National Women in Engineering Day is the inaugural event organised by the Women’s Engineering Society to celebrate their 95th anniversary as a charity supporting women in engineering. It has been recognised that a skills gap in engineering is looming, and one way of addressing this is to get more girls to consider engineering as a realistic career option for them. This will have the dual benefit of creating more diversity in the engineering sector (where fewer than 10% of the workforce is women), and creating a bigger talent pool of future engineers from which to recruit.

To support National Women in Engineering Day, WMG could think of no better way of celebrating the achievements of women in engineering then by taking some time to look at the fascinating career stories from some of our own staff and students. We have asked some of our colleagues to tell us about their career paths and what they love most about engineering. The responses clearly show very different reasons and interests which led people towards engineering and the range of very different areas that engineers can pursue. What many of those profiled have in common are the reasons that they developed their enthusiasm for engineering – love of being creative in problem solving, understanding how things work and how we can make them better, and that amazing moment when you see the results of your work making a difference.

Read some of our staff profiles

Read some of our student and alumni profiles

You can follow the discussion of National Women in Engineering Day on twitter using #NWED

Visit the NWED website.

Dr Tina Barnes, Principal Teaching Fellow at WMG, has been re-elected to the Executive Committee of the UK Council for Graduate Education (UKCGE).

UKCGE was founded in 1994 and is the leading independent representative body for Postgraduate Education in the UK. Its mission is to be the authoritative voice for postgraduate education in the UK, providing high quality leadership and support to members in order to promote a strong and sustainable postgraduate education sector.

The Council’s activities are managed by the Executive Committee which consists of 12 elected individuals who are responsible for the overall management and control of UKCGE. All Executive Committee members are elected for a three year term and support the Council on a voluntary basis.

Dr Barnes was appointed UKCGE Honorary Secretary in May, 2011. She co-organises and contributes to a UKCGE Working Group on the Student Experience, has authored three UKCGE publications, and co-organises events on topical issues in postgraduate education. She represents UKCGE on the HEFCE-funded Research Information and Digital Literacies Coalition (RIDLs) and the EThOS Advisory Board (Electronic Theses Online Service). She also served as a member of the Steering Committee for the Professional Doctorates Special Interest Group (SIG), representing both Warwick and UKCGE, from July 2010 until September 2012.

The University of Warwick was proud to award Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women, an Engineering Doctorate at its degree ceremony on Wednesday 22nd January. This was not an honorary degree but one for which she studied as a student at WMG at the University.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka was Deputy President of South Africa from 2005 to 2008 and was the first woman to hold this position, and at that point the highest ranking woman in South Africa’s history. In 2010 she was offered her current role at the United Nations by the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Margaret Low, Principal Teaching Fellow at WMG has received a highly commended certificate from STEMNET for her work promoting STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects.

Margaret was nominated for the STEMNET Awards (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Network) by colleagues who work with her across her activities.

Tariq El-Ayat from STEMNET added in his response:

We were hugely impressed by [Margaret’s] level of dedication in inspiring young people in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. We greatly appreciate [Margaret’s] involvement in STEMNET’s programmes, and hope to hear more about activities in future."

Professor Christina Hughes, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education said:

I have been tremendously impressed by Margaret’s dedication to working with and promoting STEM Ambassadors to as wide an audience as possible, Margaret has not only engaged fully in new developments within the University of Warwick, she has also engaged with a range of external partners in ways that make a serious regional contribution to enhancing public understandings of STEM.”

A group from the University of Warwick, including WMG, have recently presented a workshop at the Mozilla Festival 2013 in London (25th - 27th of October 2013) in collaboration with the University's Technology Volunteers. The workshop 'Connecting With Our World' was based on the Technology Volunteers outreach activities at the University of Warwick and formed part of the festival stream “Making the Web Physical”.

Workshop participants built a range of simple sensors and interfaces, developing programs to respond to events in the physical environment. Creativity and fun were key elements of the session, and towards the end of the workshop, there were demonstrations of the creations.

The aim of the Technology Volunteers outreach activities is to give young people a deeper understanding of the role of hardware and software, while having fun designing and making things. The team made contact with similarly minded people over the course of the weekend, running workshops and attending sessions, and hope to have the opportunity to work with them in the future.

WMG, at the University of Warwick, is delighted to have achieved a department Bronze Award from Athena Swan in recognition for its employment and engagement practices for women working in science, engineering and technology.