Meet our May Wonders and Wows winners

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. 

Stuart Croft, Vice-Chancellor, was out on campus to surprise colleagues again, and the Internal Comms team was on hand to capture these special moments.

After presenting the awards, Stuart said:  

"Our winners this month are doing fantastic work on research culture and in helping school-age children understand the law.

Thank you so much, and congratulations. The truth is, everybody who gets one of these awards is a star."

You can congratulate the winning colleagues in the comments section at the bottom of the page.

Transcript

Wonder:

Stuart: So I'm over in Social Sciences, as you can see from the wonderful archway behind, to award a Wonder to some fantastic colleagues in the Centre for Education Studies -Jamie Burford, Emily Henderson who've done fantastic work on research culture helping to understand and support students joining our doctoral programme and working with them while they are here. So let's go and award a Wonder!

Hello, hello I have Wows and Wonders Awards for Jamie and for Emily!

No good you're looking around to say who is responsible for nominating us but you were nominated and are getting these awards for the fantastic work that you do with the research students, with the early career researchers, and of course the work you're doing to encourage people, support people on their journey to become doctoral students as well. So thank you both so much. Let me first if I may - come another round of applause. [Applause]

The truth is everybody who gets one of these awards they genuinely are our stars! So guess what's in here, guess what's in there. You have to open it and lift it aloft. Brilliant stuff, well done, thank you!

Wow:

Stuart: Have you watched Taskmaster? If you have you'll know what I'm talking about because today's Wow Winner has taken that concept and applied it to something called School Tasking, through a variety of different kind of activities, helping children understand about the law. So our wow winner today is Ali Struthers.

Ali: So I decided to create the School Tasking project because I was looking for more exciting ways to work with our primary schools. We already do a bit of outreach with primary schools, which is great, but I wanted a project that was really exciting and really engaging and gave us a brilliant reason to be going into schools. I'm a big task master fan so the connection was obvious I think. [Applause]

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.   

Dr Emily Henderson and Dr Jamie Burford

Education Studies

Dr Emily Henderson and Dr. Jamie Burford were nominated for their significant efforts in promoting a more positive and inclusive research culture for postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and early career researchers.

Emily and Jamie have led on and co-organised a number of activities to support research culture within Education Studies. They've supervised research project teams through peer reflections, invited talks and reading groups, covering topics such as improving academic writing skills, professional development and publications.

Their recent research project – Opening Up the Black Box of Pre-application Doctoral Communications – investigates the informal communications between potential doctoral applicants and university staff from an inclusion perspective.

After receiving the award, Jamie said:

"This award was such an amazing surprise! Both of us share similar interests as researchers of doctoral education and the academic profession, and we do our best to put our research into practice.

We are thrilled that we’ve been nominated for contributing to a positive and inclusive research culture. We believe that research thrives when researchers thrive, and ambitious research must not come at the expense of caring for and investing in the development of the emerging researchers we work with."

James and Emily's nominator added:

"These two colleagues take an exceptionally supportive and positive approach towards working with others. They emphasise collaboration, optimism and transformative growth through research, leading to higher wellbeing and demonstrable success in research productivity."

Warwick Wows

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

Ali Struthers, School of Law

Our Wow this month is the creative mind behind Warwick's School Tasking project. Using the format of the hit TV show, Taskmaster, this exciting outreach project enables young people to learn about interesting aspects of the law through fun and interactive tasks set in the style of Taskmaster.

Ali works to make the project suitable for school children (anyone who watches the show knows it is not child friendly!), get the producers and presenters of the show on board, create tasks for the project, get current Law students involved, and roll it out across other Law Schools. Her project has even been showcased by the BBC!

After winning the award, Ali said:

"It’s truly wonderful for School Tasking to be recognised with a Wonders and Wows award.

I’m really proud of how the project has grown from a Warwick initiative to a national competition with 25 universities across the UK.

It will bring a little bit of joy and silliness to Year 5 classes but will also, we hope, make a real difference to widening access to higher education."

Ali's nominator, Sara Hiorns, added:

"It makes me proud to work with someone who is so passionate about making law accessible for children from underprivileged backgrounds and breaking down the barriers which make them think Warwick is not a realistic option for them.

Ali has lots of work to do with teaching and research but still dedicates so much of her time to seeing this project through and building on it further."

Congratulations to all our winners and thank you to everyone who submitted a nomination. We received so many high-quality nominations - so keep an eye out for more Wonders and Wows winners in the coming weeks!

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