Dear Researchers,
Welcome to the December edition of The Sussex Researcher, we hope you are all well and looking forward to the festive break.
We are working on some new initiatives in the Research Staff Office and we are looking forward to sharing these in the New Year. One we would like to share with you now is that that the Sussex Researcher newsletter will be sent out on a termly basis and updates on RSO Workshops and Events monthly.
If you haven’t already, please take 5 minutes to complete the Researcher Pulse Survey. Closing date is Friday 16th December. This is an opportunity to give us feedback to inform improvements that we make to the service. Upon completing it there are chances to win an Amazon voucher.
One of the highlights from this year was the Research with Impact Day where we held the Research Staff Showcase event. We will be holding this again in June 2023 as part of the Festival of Doctoral Research, so please look out for it. Another highlight were the successful projects with the Enhancing Research Culture funding from Research England, including the STEMM Fellowship Scheme and the Seed Funding. Finally, we were happy to announce that we reunited with the Doctoral School in August and look forward to more collaborative work and events in 2023.
Here are some quick highlights from this edition:
We would like to wish all a wonderful holiday and a very happy New Year.
Warmest regards,
The Research Staff Office Team
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Workshops & Events
Research staff are expected to engage in a minimum of 10 days’ professional development pro rata, per year
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Events organised by other teams
The Productive Researcher: how to keep writing- Friday, 2nd December 2022, 10:00- 12:00
Community of Practice for Mentors - Wednesday, 7th December 2022, 12:00- 13:00
Welcome session for new staff- Thursday, 8th December 2022, 09:30- 11:30 |
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Five University of Sussex academics among top 1% of most cited researchers in the world. Five professors from the University of Sussex have been recognised as world-leading researchers after being named on the Highly Cited Researchers 2022 list published this month.
The annual list, compiled by global analysts Clarivate Analytics, recognises the most influential researchers from across the world who have produced multiple highly cited papers in the last decade.
It is drawn from the academic papers ranked in the top 1% of most cited works for their field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index, with deeper qualitative analysis used to identify this year’s Highly Cited Researchers.
The five University of Sussex academics on the list this year are:
Professor Ian Scoones, Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies
Professor of Technology and Society Adrian Smith, from the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the Business School
Professor of Energy Policy Benjamin Sovacool, also from the Science Policy Research Unit at the Business School
Professor of Biology Dave Goulson from the School of Life Sciences
Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Anil Seth from the School of Engineering and Informatics
In total, 7,225 researchers from 69 countries and regions across the globes feature on this year’s list.
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Sussex Professors win EPSRC grant for ''adventurous'' research
A prestigious Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) New Horizons grant for “adventurous” research has been awarded to Professor Luc Berthouze and Professor George Parisis, from the Department of Informatics at Sussex.The New Horizons scheme provides funding for high-risk, researcher-led projects to test radical new ideas and create transformative knowledge.
Berthouze and Parisis’ New Horizons-funded project proposes to rethink the management of large-scale networks through the lens of neuroscience, building on the fact that ICT infrastructures are large-scale interconnected systems that share many characteristics with the brain.
In neuroscience, uncertainty around how the brain works has led to the development of network-based methodological frameworks to understand brain function. The project will use and adapt these neuroscientific frameworks to identify unknown complex interdependencies in ICT networks and provide the means for network management to detect anomalies and facilitate root cause analysis.
The shared conceptualisation of brain and ICT networks as complex systems aims to enable the development of a new generation of management frameworks. It marks a radical departure from existing network data analytics, and could help in preventing and solving network outages in modern ICT infrastructures.
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''In hard times, a kindness culture is not a nice-to-have- It's essential.'' On World Kindness Day (Sunday 13 November), leading kindness experts from the University of Sussex’s Centre for Research on Kindness called for a culture of kindness to be a top national priority. As the cost-of-living crisis, spiralling inflation and warnings of Covid and flu surges all set the scene for a tough winter, the Sussex academics are challenging leaders to show kindness and compassion.
Speaking at the world's largest online celebration of kindness, KindFest on Friday 11 November, the academics, Professor Robin Banerjee - dubbed the 'Professor of Kindness' - Dr Gillian Sandstrom, Senior Lecturer in the Psychology of Kindness, and Claudia Hammond, Visiting Professor for the Public Understanding of Psychology, drew on findings from The Kindness Test. The huge public science project, which saw the University of Sussex partnering with the BBC, demonstrated that in hard times kindness is valued more than ever, with two thirds of people participating in the survey stating that the pandemic made people kinder.
Professor Robin Banerjee, Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex and Founder of the Sussex Centre for Research on Kindness: "It is easy to trivialise kindness as a soft attribute, perhaps even a sign of weakness, but especially in hard times, a kindness culture isn't a nice-to-have; it's essential. Indeed, findings The Kindness Test, the world's largest study of kindness, give us a clear indication of how acts of kindness can help forge a sense of community, boost wellbeing, and fundamentally brighten someone's day when things might feel bleak and desperate. Especially when circumstances are difficult - the cost-of-living crisis being just one of the big global challenges we are facing - people are telling us how important it is to notice and celebrate kindness." The aim of The Kindness Test is to learn more about how people's attitudes and experiences might vary across different groups, and how experiences of kindness might relate to health, well-being, and other social and psychological experiences.
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The Brilliant Club - Tutor Training opportunities
The Brilliant Club is an award-winning university access charity. They recruit and train PhD students and ECRs to support less advantaged school pupils access the most competitive universities and succeed when they get there. The Brilliant Club provides PhDs and ECRs training in widening participation, research communication, and teaching. Researchers are then paid to deliver academically rigorous programmes to small groups of pupils in state schools across the UK.
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Research Funding
If applying for funding, remember to check funders' eligibility criteria carefully and discuss the opportunity with your host institution/department prior to preparing any applications.
Do look at Research Development webpages for guidance around applications
For more information about ECR Fellowships, check out our new webpage:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/staff/research/researchstaff/funding/fellowship-opportunities
For Coronavirus information for research grant applicants & grant holders check out:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/staff/research/development/covid-19 |
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HIMR Focused Research Grants
These support research groups to work on adventurous and challenging mathematical problems, or to discuss important new developments in mathematics.
Deadline for Applications: 26th January 2023
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EPSRC circular economy critical mass programmes
This EPSRC investment aims to support up to 2 critical mass circular economy programmes co-created with stakeholders to deliver high impact novel research.
Projects can be up to £6 million at 80% full economic cost. Project duration can be up to 60 months.
Deadline for Applications: 1st February 2023
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International fellowships
EPSRC circular economy critical mass programmes -
The International Placement Scheme (IPS) provides early career researchers, and AHRC-funded and ESRC-funded doctoral students, with inclusive and dedicated access to the internationally renowned collections, programmes and expertise held at IPS host institutions.
You will receive £1,000 for travel and visa costs and £1,925 for each month of the fellowship.
Fellowship lasts between 2 and 6 months.
Deadline for Applications: 23rd February 2023
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