The Learning and Teaching Network provides sessions based around the categories used in the National Student Survey for staff working towards enhancing learning, teaching and assessment.

Details of sessions arranged for the Spring Term are now available to view at https://www.kent.ac.uk/teaching/networks/ltn/index.html

All staff are welcome to attend.

To confirm your attendance please email cpdbookings@kent.ac.uk

The next Pub Night will be on Tuesday 30 January with the theme of business start-up. This will be a great opportunity to network with fellow alumni and current Kent students and catch up on news from Kent.

The Kent Hub for Innovation and Enterprise will be joining us to talk about how you can start your own business and what help the University can give students, staff and alumni.

Come along to find out about business start-up workshops, online modules, mentors and workspace facilities that may help you get your business going.

You’ll also get the chance to hear from and speak to Kent graduate, David Browne, who started his own business with help from the University so it will be great for those who are not sure where to start or those just starting. David founded Convert Energy, a renewable energy design and project management company based in Canterbury, with his business partner Ben Glancy.

We will be at the Miller’s Arms in Canterbury on Tuesday 30 January from 18.00 – 20.00. Please come along even if you aren’t thinking of starting your own business to meet with current students and fellow alumni!

Click here to register and get your first drink free.

You may have seen in the news that a vulnerability has been found which affects central processing units (CPUs) in many of the devices we all use.

What we are doing:

Information Services are working hard to ensure that University Infrastructure is updated appropriately, and that any potential risks are mitigated.

What you should do:

We advise you to apply security updates for your own devices as you would normally. It is always important to keep your device updated with the latest security updates.

We will offer further advice through IS News as manufacturers respond to the issue. Further details and advice can be from the National Cyber Security Centre and on the BBC News website.

Why not start the New Year learning a new language?

The Centre for English and World Languages (CEWL) is offering four ten-week beginners’ courses in French, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish at a reduced price for Kent staff.

Classes will take place on Monday evenings from 18:00-20:00 at the Canterbury campus starting on 22 January 2018.

People who have taken the Language Express courses say it not only increased their knowledge of the language of a country, but also its culture, and encouraged them to continue learning the language.

For more information on classes, fees and how to book your place, visit the Language Express webpages.

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you all for what you have done for our University this year. It has been incredibly successful with much to be proud of – including our Gold rating in the TEF, the launch of KMTV on terrestrial television, a well-deserved Higher Education Academy award for the Centre for Child Protection and, more recently, a Times Higher Education Award for our Student Success Project. None of these initiatives and achievements would be possible without the help and support of all our staff across the whole of the University.

Congratulations as well to all our successful researchers and research support teams who have secured funding for their work across our faculties of Humanities, Social Sciences and Sciences. The diversity of the research undertaken here at Kent, its interdisciplinary nature and the collaborations involved are just fantastic. The work you do really does transform lives.

May I wish you all a peaceful and happy break over the Christmas and New Year period. It has been a very busy few months and I think we are all ready for a bit of ‘down time’. I look forward to continued working with you over the next few months and celebrating many more successes together in 2018.

Professor Karen Cox
Vice-Chancellor and President

………..

A video of Professor Cox ‘In Conversation’ with our Chancellor Gavin Esler on Foundation Day (23 November 2017) is now available on YouTube

In November a team of Information Services staff came together to raise money for Catching Lives. The event was a great success and after totting up online donations and the amount raised on the night we can announce a grand total of £1,122!

Catching Lives works hard to support rough sleepers, homeless and vulnerably housed people in and around Canterbury. We were proud to be able to contribute to the efforts of such a vital community organisation. Terry from Catching Lives (right) visited the Templeman Library to collect the cheque and told us that the money we raised will be used to help with their winter shelter – an essential service for many in our city this Christmas.

Special thanks go out to Suzanne Duffy (from left), Nikki Gregory, Josie Caplehorne and Clair Waller (not pictured) for pulling the event together!

Big thanks also to Dr Oliver Double for being a splendid quiz-master/compere and everyone who contributed to making the evening such a success.

A Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) grant awarded to a consortium of researchers from the UK and Thailand, led by Professor Colin Robinson (School of Biosciences, University of Kent), aims to establish production capacity for biopharmaceuticals and animal vaccines in Thailand.

The grant kicked off with a great meeting of the whole consortium in Bangkok in December. Research teams from the National Biopharmaceutical Facility (NBF) at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi and The National Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC), Bangkok, are joining forces with researchers from the University of Kent, UCL, Imperial College and LSHTM to undertake this ambitious project.

Biopharmaceuticals are protein drugs that are used to treat a wide variety of diseases, including cancer and auto-immune diseases. These drugs are normally produced in animal or bacterial cells, which means they are expensive to make. Thailand currently imports all of its b  iopharmaceuticals, making them prohibitively expensive for most patients, resulting in fewer than 2% of patients having access to anti-cancer biopharmaceuticals that are routinely used in the UK. Likewise, imported animal vaccines are expensive and often ineffective because they are not designed to combat the strains of virus that affect livestock locally.

The aim of this GCRF project is to combine the expertise of scientists in the UK with those in Thailand in order to develop the capacity for Thailand to make their own biopharmaceuticals and animal vaccines, reducing costs and in turn, widening availability.  In the long term, the project aims to not only develop a production pipeline for biopharmaceuticals and animal vaccines in Thailand, but to disseminate the processes and results from this project to allow neighbouring SE Asian countries to begin production of these “high-tech” drugs, ultimately leading to a significant improvement in human health in this region.

For further information, see an introductory booklet on GCRF or the RCUK webpages.

On 8 January 2018, Tim Meacham, Lecturer in Fine Art and Partner College Liaison Officer in the School of Music and Fine Art, is delivering a paper with a video & sound piece as part of the Large Objects Moving Air conference (LOMA) with CRISAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice at UAL , London College of Communication.

And in February 2018,  in conjunction with the Turner Contemporary Margate, Meacham has been asked to make a piece of work as part of the Journeys with the Wasteland exhibition which explores the significance of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land through visual arts. The work – Eye of the needle – will be exhibited in the Hantverk & Found gallery in Margate http://www.hantverk-found.co.uk/

Of the work Tim explains: ‘The viewer accompanies the needle on its journey across the landscape of a gramophone record.   The role of the needle is considered in first embedding sound, through creating the grooves of the record, and then as a “rider” travelling across the surface of the disc as it plays. 78-rpm records, made of shellac and slate dust, give something of themselves (dust) in order to release their sound, thus changing the landscape with each play.’

The work explores TS Eliot’s relationship with the mechanical sound recording of the gramophone, making particular reference to its role in The Waste Land in providing the machine mediated sound track of modernity.

“She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.”

The Waste Land 254-56

For more info go to https://www.timmeacham.space/

A busy year in Information Services has meant many well deserved Staff Excellence Awards for 2017!

Each year we reward individuals and teams alike for going above and beyond, be it by working on a project or simply excelling in their day-to-day roles.

Denise Everitt, Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer and John Sotillo, Director Information Services awarded the prizes at a ceremony which was followed by a celebratory lunch.

Congratulations to all staff members who bagged an award, and thank you for all your hard work for Information Services.