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.

WMG has committed to a new government initiative, Your Life, working in partnership with educators, industry and government to boost female participation in technology and engineering.

Birmingham households will be first to pilot new technology being developed by WMG at the University of Warwick that aims to create the next generation of 'Smart' homes with “smart” things working together in a “smart city”.

WMG has secured funding from the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Digital Economy Theme to partner with Birmingham City Council to create the HARRIET (HAT Resource Integration and Enabling Tool) project. This will equip homes with technology and software to create a HAT (Hub-of-all-Things), which aims to assist individuals to better understand their household behaviour and make “smarter” money saving and time saving decisions based on the data they then share on how they act as consumers within their homes see http://hubofallthings.com

The 18-month £485,000 project will work with volunteer households and individuals in Birmingham to collect, analyse and transform the “big data” about product and service consumption produced by modern households on a daily basis that will be stored in individuals’ personal HAT database.

Young people in local secondary schools have a chance to demonstrate their computing skills, in a competition for schools and youth groups supported by WMG and Computer Science at the University of Warwick.

Categories in the Challenge IT 2014 event included web design, mobile phone app development, digital animation and robotic applications.

Spearheading the idea was the Coventry branch of the British Computer Society , supported by a range of sponsors including the IET, IBM, OCR, TTS and Capgemini. Several WMG staff took part. Margaret Low is part of the BCS Coventry team that ran the competition, Claire White and Peter Ward from WMG both judged entries.

Four pupils from North Leamington School have won the national final for F1 in Schools and will now represent the UK at the world finals, which are being held in Abu Dhabi in November. Academics from WMG have been working with the students to help them to develop 3D printed parts for their car, which won the UK competition at the NEC earlier this month.

The team from Leamington Spa, named Whittle Wonders, has been supported by WMG for the last three years of the competition. Dr Greg Gibbons, Head of Additive Layer Manufacturing Research at WMG helped the team to produce 3D printed parts for their cars, including the front nose cone and aerofoil components.

The University of Warwick is helping students with physical disabilities from a local college become their own product designers so they can 3D-print personalised objects that help them in their everyday lives.

Students at Hereward College in Coventry, located close to the University of Warwick campus, are tapping into university expertise in additive layer manufacturing (commonly known as 3D printing) and adaptive systems so they can create assistive equipment that is adapted to their own personal needs.

By learning to use computer-assisted design technology through sessions with staff and students from the University of Warwick, a group of Hereward students with restricted physical movement have come up with solutions to every-day challenges, such as eating and drinking, which they can print out with the click of a button.

On Wednesday 15 January, WMG welcomed members of the Bloodhound Supersonic Car (SSC) project team for a series of events held in the International Manufacturing Centre.

The Bloodhound SSC is a jet and rocket powered car and is being designed and built to achieve 1,000 mph (just over 1,600 kph) - which would break the land speed record by 33%, the largest ever margin. The project is being directed by Richard Noble OBE, who also attended and spoke during the event on Wednesday.

During a busy visit, the Bloodhound team were a feature of an Engineering Careers afternoon which was run in collaboration with the School of Engineering. In the afternoon, 95 pupils from 8 local schools in Coventry and Warwickshire visited the university to find out more about the variety of exciting careers offered through studying Engineering.

WMG has launched a new initiative, the Business Innovation Group (BIG), which will act as a channel to focus WMG’s business engagement activity and support organisations who are looking to transform for success in the digital economy.

The Business Innovation Group will engage and work with a wide range of business partners, from start-ups and SMEs, through WMG’s SME Team within IIPSI, to large organisations and policymakers. BIG is led by WMG's Business Transformation research group, but will draw on its access to cutting-edge research and expertise across all of WMG’s research areas to support organisational and economic transformation. Specifically, BIG will help organisations to adapt their products, services and operations to respond to the connected digital economy as well as assist organisations to evolve and implement new business and economic models as technology continues to transform society.

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.”