Sample Space 2 - the sequel!
I am very excited to introduce the second issue of the departmental magazine in my relatively new role as Head of the Department — I took over from Richard Chandler in September 2021 (you can read some sassy details of the transition in this issue). You may judge me if I say this out loud but I was, and still am, very excited and proud to become the head of the department where, essentially, I have spent my entire adult career!
The last two years have been incredibly complicated for everyone and our community has certainly been no exception — I think we owe my predecessor a great debt of gratitude for all of his hard work, as we navigated through the Covid years. All of us had to come to terms with a different way of living and working, including amusing hours of home-schooling the children, while converting all our lecture slides into html formats and figuring out how to deliver an online lecture while ensuring that at least one of the students was still awake by the end of it!
It goes without saying, but I will nonetheless say thank you to all our amazing staff, who have gone beyond the call of duty. And of course, to all our students who had to live through the most absurd university experience. In this issue, we’ve collected some testimonies both from our staff and our students), as well as reported on some important work related to the pandemic emergency.
Behind the scenes, a lot has been going on in the department (including some modern day testing experiments): in particular, we have continued our trajectory of sustained growth in our staff and the last two years have seen a significant intake of exciting new colleagues. I am particularly pleased with the fantastic group of early career researchers that we have managed to attract in the past few years — some of our new colleagues introduce themselves in this issue. Their work has contributed to revive the vibrant environment in the department and expand the breadth of research themes and excellence in our community, including amongst our amazing PhD students.
Speaking of research, I am also pleased to report that our results for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise have been positive — our submission is joint with our cousins in Mathematics. We have improved on several metrics, including research impact and we are ranked fifth on “4/3” (which is an overall measure of world-leading and internationally excellent research). We now rank eighth for “research power” (a measure of research quality, weighted by the number of staff returned) and we are very close to the institutions sitting immediately above us in this metric. Personally, I think that we are still on a journey and we haven’t fully reaped the fruits of our investments in human resources and that the next one will be the REF in which we graduate to top five. I hope that we will continue to establish further our community and the sense of belonging for all our staff and students.
In the time since the last issue of Sample Space, we have also worked hard to establish a presence on several social medial channels: we now have a quite vibrant Twitter account and are active on Instagram and LinkedIn. This may sound unnecessarily chirpy and hipster, but I think these have already been very good media to generate discussion and showcase many of the activities that go on in the department (including the brilliant widening participation effort of Data Detectives, described here) and so I am personally pleased that we have started developing them — for which I definitely need to thank our “Social Media Team” of Sam Livinstone, Javier Rubio, Brieuc Lehmann and Audrey Gbato.
We’ve also started our podcast series (aptly named “Random Talks”), thanks to the brilliant work of Sam, Terry Soo, Nathan Green and Brieuc, who have already produced some super-interesting episodes, including one where Tom Fearn tells about his experience sitting on the UCL eugenics inquiry, which is also presented in this issue.