Congratulations to our staff members whose appointments as the new Foundation, Honorary and Associate Fellows have been announced by The Warwick Institute of Engagement (WIE).

The role of the Fellows will be to establish the Institute as an interdisciplinary hub for the whole university, and work together to create exciting new engagement opportunities for staff and students.  

Over the next few months the Institute will be creating a series of Learning Circles with the new Engagement Fellows. These Circles will cover a range of topics such as the future of engagement in HE, collaborating with communities and student training in Public Engagement. Longer term they are committed to supporting staff and students in providing up to date training and development opportunities and supporting institutional level engagement events such as City of Culture.

Professor Michael Scott and Jane Furze, Directors of the Warwick Institute of Engagement, said: 

“Congratulations to all our new Fellows! We’re delighted to have attracted such a diverse, multi-disciplinary range of colleagues and students to join the Institute. Engagement is all about universities working with people and listening to voices outside academia to create and share knowledge collaboratively. Collectively, we have a great foundation to build on the fantastic engagement work already happening at Warwick and drive forward our genuinely new and exciting approach to engagement.”

WMG staff WIE fellows:

Foundation Fellows:

Evé Wheeler-Jones

Ian Tuersley

Phil Jemmett

Honorary Fellows:

Caroline Meyer

Lisa Harding

Margaret Low

Associate Fellows:

Dave Harvey

Mark Williams

Margaret Low, Principal Teaching Fellow at WMG, has been selected by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) for a National Teaching Fellowship.

Margaret was recognised by the HEA for her individual excellence, raising the profile of excellence and developing excellence in teaching.

Margaret is an inspirational educator with 30 years’ experience in the HE sector. She teaches on both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. She is also our Widening Participation Officer, coordinating activities across the department and collaborating with other colleagues within the University.

A National Teaching Fellowship is the HEA’s most prestigious individual award for excellence in teaching in higher education.

Professor Lord Bhattacharyya, Chairman of WMG said "I am delighted that Margaret has had her dedication to teaching recognised by the HEA. Her contribution to WMG has had a significant impact on the students she has taught and the department as a whole."

Warwick received three Fellowships (the most that any institution can be awarded) which makes it the only institution to achieve this distinction in 2016.

Engineers from WMG will be running two special summer school workshops at The Royal Institution’s Science Lives Here event, in London, designed to help inspire budding engineers.

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.

On Wednesday 13 August, Margaret Low (Principal Teaching Fellow at WMG) and Dr Simon Leigh from the University of Warwick, ran a summer school at the Royal Institution in London called Illuminating Engineering. The event showed how modern-day manufacturing links together art, science, engineering and technology in order to create new, exciting and bespoke products.

The one-day workshop demonstrated how these links can be brought together through design, software and hardware engineering skills and how engineers need to have an appreciation of the other areas to get any project off the ground. Students designed and manufactured a bespoke, interactive lamp controlled by a micro-processor, writing the software for the interactive lamp and exploring the design and production of a personalised lamp shade using digital manufacturing tools.

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.

Students from the Engineering Society at the University of Warwick took part in The Market Bosworth School’s Science Fair earlier this month, to run a series of workshops with children to teach them about the forces involved in rollercoasters.

The workshops saw the children designing and building an array of impressive small-scale rollercoasters using pipe insulation, complete with stomach churning twists and turns. The creations were then tested using marbles to demonstrate the laws of motion.

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.

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.