GRADnet in collaboration with Mark Horner, Performance Pathways, successfully ran a three-day online course 15-17 February 2021 via Microsoft Teams for 30 delegates focusing on transferrable skills development.  The workshop looked at the complexities of team working, effective communication and how to best perform in a team, remote team working, with the opportunity to develop leadership qualities and skills.

Participants explored the benefits of, and opportunities for, improved self and social awareness; gaining an understanding of one’s strengths and areas for support; looking at how one’s working style impacts on co-workers; developing the experience, skills and qualities needed for future leadership.

Working in teams, remotely, using some A4 sheets of paper, paper clips and sticky tape, delegates had to construct a paper structure and balance a plastic bottle on top.

Chris Brunskill, Head of UK Space Programme, D-Orbit kindly provided the challenge “Design of a commercial space service” where delegates had to pitch and present their business plan in under 15 minutes! 

Congratulations to Team A who won the challenge:  Adel Aljarid, University of Sussex, Josefine Gårn, University of Hertfordshire, Kai Sun, University of Southampton, Terje Theisen, Royal Holloway University of London and Hannah Wood, University of Sussex.  They chose to start a satellite company for the remote censoring of crop fields to help farmers and insurance companies with crop fields.

This years’ Winter School was due to take place at Cumberland Lodge, Great Park Windsor, but was switched to online delivery due to the current Covid-19 lockdown.  The tech worked and thankfully everything ran very smoothly.

Feedback from participants:

• “Good organisation of the workshop, communicating schedules and resources etc. and using the technology to make this work remotely”.
• “The workshop facilitators were great and very effective. They did a great job motivating me to do my best.”
• “Thank you for a great event! I really enjoyed myself and both Mark and Chris were great.”

Congratulations to Dr Carolyn Devereux FRAS, University of Hertfordshire, on the publication of her new book: “Cosmological Clues:  Evidence for the Big Bang, Dark Matter and Dark Energy”.

Carolyn is a lecturer in astrophysics at the Centre for Astrophysics Research, specialising in galaxy evolution and observational cosmology using Cosmic Microwave Background lensing. After gaining her PhD from University College University (1990), she researched  electro-optical devices using ferroelectric liquid crystals and liquid crystal polymers at the Hirst Research Centre, GEC. After managing large IT projects in industry, followed by a career break, she changed fields to become an astrophysicist focusing on the measurement of dark matter halo mass and the role of dark matter in the evolution of the Large Scale Structure of the Universe.  

This book gives an overview of cosmology showing how the different theories and observations fit together to make the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model. The book is for beginner students (it is written without any equations) and focusses on understanding the concepts that make up the LCDM model of cosmology. It is written in a readable way with stories about how the LCDM model developed and the scientists involved in it’s  development. It covers the early universe, including difficult topics such as structure formation and inflation, and it looks at current research, exploring some of the key questions that we have in cosmology. This is a book that will help students understand cosmology.

To obtain access to the book see here.

Abstract:  Did the Universe have a beginning? Will it have an end? Or has it always been the same, never changing? This is the subject of cosmology; the study of the Universe, and this book provides a perfect introduction to the subject for anyone that is interested in the wonders of our Universe

This book provides an accessible overview of the Standard Model of Cosmology, which is explained in six Cosmological Clues, including evidence for the Big Bang and dark matter and dark energy – the keystones of modern cosmology. 

It takes readers through some of the most exciting questions in cosmology, such as what evidence do we have that the Universe started from the Big Bang? Has dark matter been observed? Will we ever know what dark energy is? Are the multiverses real? And could the Universe be a hologram? 

This book is an ideal guide for anyone interested in finding out more about our Universe. It will be of interest to those studying cosmology for the first time, including readers without a scientific background, who have an interest in looking up at the stars and wondering where they all came from!

Key features: 

• Contains the latest evidence for the Big Bang, dark matter, and dark energy and explores exciting scientific ideas, such as inflation and multiverses

• Provides a clear explanation of the main theories of how the Universe evolved based on key observations – the Cosmological Clues

• Gives the reader a concise introduction to the scientific process, using cosmology as the example, and explores why it has been so successful in creating the technologies we have today

Over 50 delegates signed up to the GRADnet Online Machine Learning and AI Workshop on Wednesday, 20 January 2021 via Zoom. Topics covered were Linear Regression; Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks supported. 

mybinder.org set up by the Turing Institute along with other notable organisations was a useful   tool for this workshop and helped students to run scripts or run jupyter notebooks through their browser linked to the tags of the git repository.

This workshop is always very popular in the GRADnet training calendar and the feedback was once again very positive, particularly for an online event:

• “Doing these things on zoom is excellent! It makes it so much easier to attend. It would be great to keep this option after the pandemic ends.”
• “Great to have the breakout room discussions with hands on practise with the code. The helpers were also very helpful, and interesting to talk to about the wider topic of ML”
• “The explanation of the Jupyter notebooks was really great.”

Thank you to Professor Adrian Bevan, Queen Mary University of London for delivering this workshop and postgraduate researchers, Joe Davies and Tong Qui, also from QMUL, who provided excellent hands-on support during the workshop. 

GRADnet looks forward to working with Adrian and his team next year!

One of the highlights on my calendar is running the “Turning Science into Business Workshop” for your PhD participants. Now in its 4th year, we all went online and with fast moving content, lots of lively group exercises and a real life case study to work on, I’m pleased to say that maintained our high level of participant satisfaction! 

Here’s a snippet from the feedback: 

“…Short, simple, practical, useful and fun…Excellent opportunity to learn about business models…Very useful in explaining the marketing and customer side of things, which scientist often lack…Well structured, well delivered, good overview with a positive delivery…Teaches a structure to test whether business ideas are worth pursuing…”

The reason I particularly like working with your gang is that the science brain embraces the method of developing a hypothesis, identifying the biggest risks and then running a test to discover missing evidence. And it’s just this approach that I use to help all sorts of people from all walks of life to move their ideas forward. 

This year I launched my new book, The Really Good Idea Test published by Pearson. As I write, I’ve just found out that today it has made it into WHSmiths as their 6th best-selling business book; so it really is a recommended read for anyone who wants to work through a new idea and find out if it has legs. 

To celebrate the launch, I would like to offer up a free hour of my time to anyone who buys the book in 2020. Perhaps you want to talk through how to commercialise your research? Or perhaps something more general – a career in business, product or innovation? 

You can find the book here on Amazon, you can find me at productdoctor.co.uk and email me direct: julia@productdoctor.co.uk

Article written by Julia Shalet, Product Doctor

SEPnet postgraduate researchers were given the opportunity to learn how to commercialise their research and get a better understanding of innovation in practice at the Turning Science into Business online workshop 1-2 December 2020. 

The workshop was run by Julia Shalet, Product Doctor, experienced innovator and author. Julia has run very highly rated workshops for SEPnet and has also worked with thousands of innovators across a very broad range of sectors and environments. Julia’s latest book is “The Really Good Idea Test“.

Working in teams, with a real-life case study from , Mason Rowbottom, Chief Executive at Addisol Ltd, delegates created a meaningful value proposition offering solutions to Mason in an interactive session.  They discovered how to reduce their biggest risks before building anything. 

Delegates thought the workshop was an “excellent opportunity to learn about business models and broaden your possibilities on industry” and “very useful in explaining the marketing and customer side of things, which scientist often lack”.

Thank you to Julia and Mason for your contribution to a great workshop.

IOP Publishing is one of the world’s foremost publishers within the physical sciences, with over 80 titles covering all aspects of physics. For early career scientists starting out in research, the world of academic publishing can be somewhat confusing. In this webinar we aim to shed some light on this process and enable you to navigate it to maximise the impact and visibility your research. This talk will cover topics such as open access, choosing the correct journal for your work, the peer-review process, and promoting your research. More information can be found on the IOP Publishing Support site at https://publishingsupport.iopscience.iop.org/.

Register here by 24 November.

The GRADnet Induction day online event took place on Wednesday, 21 October 2020 with a welcome from Cristobel Soares, SEPnet Graduate Network Manager University of Surrey.

Over 120 new starters signed up for the following workshops:

• Introduction to basic Python and Scientific Python:  Dr Tim Kinnear, University of Kent
• Science communication skills:  Dr Heather Campbell, University of Surrey, Dr Claudia Antolini, Royal Holloway University of London, Hannah Tonry, University of Kent
• Software skills needed for research:  Claire Hepwood, Royal Holloway, University of London

Included in the programme was a presentation from Jack Foster, postgraduate researcher at the University of Southampton, on his recent SEPnet PGR placement with Crossfield Fusion Limited.  Jack worked remotely due to COVID-19 with this new start-up company specializing in compact fusion reactors.  He outlined the benefits of completing a placement: expanding his knowledge of nuclear fusion and fusion technology; learning new software and about Particle-In-Cell (PIC) computational physics in general; having practical, hands-on experience with building a physical machine; familiarization with professional work practices and getting a job at the end of the placement! 

Well done Jack and thank you for encouraging our current cohort to consider taking up a SEPnet placement at some point in their PhD.  See here for further information on our SEPnet Placement Scheme.

Thank you to all our presenters for supporting this GRADnet event and adapting their normal face-to-face talks with hands-on interactive group work to online delivery.  

Delegate feedback is encouraging for future online delivery but GRADnet hopes to host this event next year in London where networking will be included.  Fingers crossed!

“The best virtual seminar I’ve attended so far – well organised and informative. Thank you!”

“Clear overview of the main principles behind coding. Very clear tips and advice of what we can do to improve our code. The Teams app has been very useful and very well organized, thanks.”

“Helpful in learning the importance of communication and getting your point across in front of people with different disciplines and diverse groups.”

Virginia Apostolopou, PhD student, Soft Matter Group, University of Surrey, shares her experience of organising a SEPnet Student-led Conference: “Soft Matter: the unseen science all around us”, during challenging times.

In my first year as a PhD student at the University of Surrey, I heard about SEPnet and the exciting activities they organise for postgraduate students. Previous institutes that I have attended didn’t have these opportunities for training and networking and so I was very excited to take part in the workshops and the activities organised by the network. One of the activities that caught my attention from the beginning was the student-led conference. I loved the idea of a conference organised by postgraduates and I kept it in the back of my mind as something I will love to try in the future.

At the beginning of my second year of my PhD, I started discussing with people from my group at Surrey, the idea of submitting a conference proposal. Our motivation was the diversity of our projects; although we were all in the Soft Matter group, we worked in different projects, from industrial applications to applications of nano materials. We wanted to translate this diversity and multi-disciplinary nature of Soft Matter physics into a conference that will bring together students working from seemingly different projects, but in the core, the physics of their research is very similar. Our initial intention of a multi-disciplinary conference was reflected in the speakers we chose to invite: a group of six, well-established researchers from different fields of soft matter physics and different institutes agreed enthusiastically to support our conference by presenting their work.

By late February everything was ready for the conference: the schedule, the website, speakers, accommodation and the catering requirements. It was to be held at the University of Southampton, on the 25th-27th March. At the same time, more and more news started to emerge about a concentrated epidemic in a region in China, now spreading rapidly to the rest of the word. One after the other, big conferences and scientific meetings began announcing their cancellations. By early-March we were still hopeful that since we were going to be a small conference we would be able to go ahead. As we were getting closer to the dates we realised that we should face the situation sensibly and cancel the conference until further notice.

We initially decided to reschedule the conference for early September. Our decision was based on our belief that the main purpose of the conference was for the students to share their work and create future collaborations. We thought that having a virtual conference instead would dismiss that purpose. Technology is an essential tool in these weird times but still, it cannot entirely replace personal interactions among scientific communities. However, eventually, we had to face the reality of our times and rather reluctantly had to move the conference online.

To our surprise the conference was well-received! We managed to book all our invited speakers and almost all the original delegates were able to participate. Some of our speakers suggested opening the conference to students outside SEPnet. We thought that during these difficult times, it is important to open this kind of opportunity to everyone in the scientific community. We were delighted to see delegates from all over the world joining our virtual conference.

I think that overall the conference was a great success. It definitely exceeded my expectations regarding networking and engagement. I am very proud of the scientific programme that we managed to put together and the discussions that took place during the conference.

It was all the result of an excellent collaboration with a group of extremely talented people: Katrin Elidottir, Louie Scott, Malin Schulz, Mireya Borg, University of Surrey, Rhiannon Harries, University of Sussex and of course, Cristobel Soares, SEPnet Graduate Network Manager, who helped and guided us along the way.

It is very impressive to see what a team of creative and passionate people can accomplish in a these very challenging and uncertain times!

Tomás E. Müller Bravo, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton gives his perspective on organising and delivering a SEPnet student-led conference during a pandemic!

Every year SEPnet provides an opportunity to a group of postgraduate researchers to organise a two-day student-led conference at the University of Southampton. I first came to know about this when I applied for a talk at the Astronomy conference from 2019 ( From Infinity to Zero: the history of the Universe in redshift). These types of conferences are perfect for early career researchers as it is organised by students, for students, although a few academic speakers are also invited. You do not feel the same pressure as with the big international conferences where you find all the “big names” from your research field. In addition, you also get to know lots of people in the same career stages as you and share experiences.

After the 2019 conference I attended was over, I was very interested in organising one of my own. I talked to Elizabeth Swann, University of Portsmouth, the lead organiser to ask her for advice (this was really helpful!). I got very excited with the idea, so I decided to ask around in my Astronomy department for fellow PGRs who might be interested in organising a conference and started writing a proposal. At the same time a group of PGRs from the University of Hertfordshire were writing one of their own. They kindly suggested to work together instead of competing, so we started collaborating on a single proposal (after all, isn’t this what research is all about?).

Choosing the topic of the conference was relatively easy. As many big telescopes and surveys are coming in the near future, we thought it might be a good idea to focus on big data and machine learning, thus, the title of the conference: The Big Data Era in Astronomy. Finding academic speakers wasn’t too hard either. As several of us in the organising committee work on different fields, we quickly came up with a list of candidates. Cristobel Soares, Graduate Network Manager, was in charge of the logistics and  funding and very helpful with her advice and support.   We mainly had to focus on the structure, science and social events (eg, a conference dinner) at the meeting. Everything was going according to plan as the conference date was approaching, however, everything changed when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

Many things were quite uncertain at that time. We didn’t know how long and how much this pandemic would affect everyone, so we had to postpone the conference. As time passed, we grew impatient. We didn’t know if we were going to have the opportunity to host the meeting or if we would have to cancel it. Eventually, we decided to do what many other conferences, schools and workshops were doing, choose a new date and go virtual!

This was full of challenges. We didn’t have to worry about funding, conference dinner and other logistics, but we did have to think about the proper platforms to host our virtual conference on. Thankfully, all SEPnet universities have access to Microsoft Teams, so we chose it as our platform for hosting the talks. In addition, Slack is widely used in academic environments as it is perfect for asynchronous discussions, questions, announcements, etc. We also decided to use Slido for the questions at the end of each talk, which was quite new to all of us.   I actually got to know about Slido during an ESO conference I attended in June.

Unfortunately, as things were still uncertain close to the new date of the conference in September, many of the students were unable to attend. Therefore, we had to shorten the length of the conference from two days to one and cut the number of sessions by half. However, the conference turned out better than expected.

From the feedback from the participants we learnt that the length of the conference (including the length of talks, breaks, etc.) worked well. Furthermore, the platforms used (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Slido) were really useful and the attendees found the conference was worth attending. Nonetheless, most of them, given the opportunity to choose, would prefer an in-person meeting instead of a virtual one.

Fingers-crossed for the 2021 Student-led Conferences!

This year’s summer school at Herstmonceux Castle was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. GRADnet in collaboration with Skillfluence was swiftly able to offer the Careers Accelerator Online Masterclass in August.

A Southampton final year PhD student gives his perspective on attending both and the pros and cons.

Why I decided to attend the Careers Accelerator Online Masterclass: As I am coming to the end of my 3rd year as a theory PhD from the University of Southampton theory group I now have a little over a year left of my PhD. I am now looking at what to pursue post my PhD. I had little to no idea what I want to pursue as a career and I was interested in the Skillfluence online course as it covered a lot of different aspects of choosing a career and how to transition into work in industry successfully.

How was this year’s online masterclass?: The course was very enjoyable and gave a good introduction to a lot of different aspects to consider when finishing a PhD and starting a non-academic career. Some parts such as the importance of networking and how best to prepare a presentation of a task for an interview were things I had not considered in so much depth and the course covered them well. I also enjoyed the regular Q&A sessions with employers as it gave me the opportunity to ask the exact questions I wanted to ask and get more information as they were former SEPnet PhD students. This included the relevance of Graduate Schemes for PhD graduates and the role/importance of coding for different sectors. I would definitely recommend the online course for the future if GRADnet offer it in 2021 due to the current coronavirus restrictions.

Physical summer school versus virtual: I attended the 2018 SEPnet summer school at Herstmonceux Castle at the end of my first year as I felt at the time it was good to explore all these options early in my PhD when I had fewer commitments and more ‘free-time’ as it were. Given the Careers Accelerator Online Masterclass was so different as it was online as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic, I felt it was worth attending as being closer to the end of my PhD, there were different questions I wanted ask employers this time around.

There are pros and cons to hosting the course online and ‘in-person’ (for want of a better term). Attending the course in person gave me a better opportunity to meet other young PhD students and network and also it was exciting to stay at Herstmonceux Castle with the Observatory Science Centre on the doorstep. As the in-person conference was over several days the amount of time working on the subject of careers was a lot more intense than the weekly 1.5 hour sessions of the online course. However, as the online course was spread over four weeks I found it gave me the opportunity to really focus during the 1.5 hour sessions and also read through the online material on the Skillfluence learning platform at my own pace and remain focused.

Given the online courses were ‘attended’ at my PC it also meant that I could complete assignments and joint tasks using my PC which I feel is probably more relevant to actual interview preparation and general careers-related tasks.

I feel both are definitely worth attending and I have encouraged my younger PhD colleagues to attend the SEPnet professional skills schools in their first year if they can.