Meet our June Wonders and Wows winners

It's that time again - we're delighted to announce the latest staff winners of our Warwick Wonders and Wows awards! Nominated by you, these awards celebrate our outstanding people and the work we do together. 

Want to say well done? You can congratulate our winning colleagues in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

Warwick Wonders

The Warwick Wonders Award celebrates the people we are proud to work with at our University. It recognises colleagues who have gone above and beyond to make a positive difference and enrich our community.   

This month, the Internal Comms team spoke directly to the people who nominated our award-winner, as there was a particularly personal link behind their nomination...

Izzy Pierson - Warwick Sport

Professor Celine Tan from the School of Law and Paul Trimmer from the Flexible Online Learning team nominated Izzy for this month's Wonders award.

Their son Arthur is autistic and had been struggling with extracurricular activities that are typically tailored for neurotypical children. Although he’d previously attended swimming lessons before national Covid lockdowns, he had found the idea of returning to lessons anxiety-inducing, particularly due to crowds and sensory challenges.

Izzy managed to transition Arthur back into the pool, worked with him to develop his water confidence and made adjustments to her teaching so she could fully support Arthur.

After hearing about June's winner, our Vice-Chancellor Stuart Croft said:  

"This award-winner works incredibly hard to bring children through the journey of learning to swim.

She's an incredibly engaged and supportive person, and her attention and focus is so wonderful that she has to be one of our Wonders."

Wonder Transcript

Stuart: So, today's Wonder is Izzy Pierson. Izzy is a swim instructor in Warwick Sport and she works incredibly hard to bring children through that journey to learn how to swim and to enjoy the whole process and she's an incredibly engaged and supportive person. The children of all sorts of different backgrounds and one particular family wanted to nominate her for the way in which she has worked with a child with special educational needs, to help that person learn to swim and enjoy themself in the pool and her love and attention and focus has been so wonderful that she clearly has to be one of our Wonders.

Celine: So, our son Arthur is eight and he's been swimming at a Warwick Sport Centre since 2019. Arthur is autistic. Arthur finds a lot of activities very challenging due to his needs and Izzy has been absolutely fantastic in getting him to really develop his skills and his water confidence to the point that he really enjoys swimming.

Paul: I think the key to Izzy's teaching is that she is just very empathetic, she understands the child and she makes every lesson fun. There's constant smiling and laughter from the children and it just encourages a child who might otherwise stand at the side refuse to go in to actually come in and engage and to learn in a way that he could not without an excellent teacher.

Celine: Because of her natural ability and the effort that she's put in, we wanted to nominate her for the Warwick Wonders, we think she's so deserving of it.

Paul: Thank you Izzy for everything you've done for Arthur and for keeping him so enthused about learning something that we don't think he could have accessed in any other way. Thank you.

When Izzy found out she won the award, she said:

"I was really surprised to win the Warwick Wonders' Award, and I was honoured that somebody had taken the time to nominate me for it. Inclusivity is at the core of my approach to swimming teaching. I pride myself on adapting my lessons to ensure, most importantly, that everybody has fun, but also participates to the best of their ability, and achieves their maximum potential in the water."

Warwick Wows

The Warwick Wows celebrate amazing work, projects, and achievements at the University.

Margaret Low and team - WMG

Our Wows this month are Margaret Low and her team. They - in partnership with the Royal Institution - have spent the past decade running a series of engineering masterclasses for students from local schools.

These masterclasses have reached more than 250 Year 9 students from a range of backgrounds, giving each of them multiple interactions with professional engineers at the University and helping to inspire them to be part of the next generation of engineers.

Over the years, the sessions have included building crash structures, programming vehicles, learning design, and controlling digital embroidery machines with code.

Stuart Croft, our Vice-Chancellor, had this to say about WMG's win:

"Margaret and all of her colleagues have been working so hard on the Royal Institution outreach programme, inspiring schoolchildren to become the engineers of the future."

Wow Transcript

Stuart: So it's time for another award of our Warwick Wows and Wonders and I'm here today in the WMG International Manufacturing Centre and we're going to go upstairs and give an award to Margaret Low and all of her colleagues who have been working so hard for 10 years now on the Royal Institution Engineering Programme outreach to schools and school children to get them inspired to become engineers of the future. Margaret is not expecting this so let's see what happens.

I hope we can interrupt please. Look at her face!

I'm looking at you, do you know what I've got in this little box here? You know we do these fantastic Wows and Wonders, so guess what's happening now? Yes, what's happening for all the wonderful work you and the team have led with the Royal Institution work all that outreach all that connection with local schools it's been so fantastic you have been nominated and you've won!

You got a star - in commemoration of this fantastic work that you've led with your team over this actually quite a long period of time.

Margaret: Stuart thank you very much, but thank you everybody we were just saying actually we could only do these things because of the fantastic support we get from colleagues and from the department at of course the University, so you guys have all got a bit of a share of this I think. Well done, thank you.

After accepting her team's award, Margaret said:

"We can only do these things because of the fantastic support we get from colleagues, from our department and - of course - from the University. We all have a share in this."

Congratulations to all our winners and thank you to everyone who submitted a nomination. We received so many high-quality nominations - and now we're nearly ready to open the nomination form up once more! Keep an eye out over the coming weeks, and be sure to get thinking about who you might put forward to be a Wonder or a Wow...

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