I’m the Research Project Manager for the CBMA – which means I try to make sure everything runs smoothly, allowing everyone else to focus on their research.
The centre has recently awarded five PhD studentships (fully-funded by Carlotta Palmer and Neil Cross), and these new students will join in September. I’m working with the five project Principal Investigators and Christian Soeller and James Wakefield (who are leading our PhD programme) to ensure sure that our students receive a full interdisciplinary introduction and induction to the University. As our students will have a broad research focus, we want to make sure they all feel they know enough about the three colleges we work most closely with – UEMS, CLES and EMPS – so I’ve been calling each college to find out what they’re offering for their new students, and how we might get involved.
This week, we’ve received applications for round 3 of our seed corn funding, so I’m setting up meetings and asking for help from our steering group, MAGPIEs and Research Fellows with sifting these over the next few weeks. This will lead into selecting and preparing for the 6 successful projects that start in September and will run until March.
We’re also trialling a secondment funding scheme with this round of seed corns. We’re interviewing next week for someone to join our centre for 6 months. We’re looking for someone already within the university that has an established research focus (whether at PhD, post-doc or lecturer-level) but who is looking to shift their research towards the interface we work in – between clinical/biomedical and the quantitative sciences. As we work within a group that’s so broad in its research focus, the intention is to help support the secondee in a new research area – the vocabulary and skills they need will be completely different, so it will be a steep learning curve, but we’re a busy centre, and part of a much larger team so there’s always someone around that can help!
