The Centre for Environment Policy Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee interviewed Senior Finance Officer Samia Rahman from the Faculty of Natural Sciences. She gives us a window to what her Bangladeshi heritage means to her.
Author: FoNS News
Thomas Walker is a second-year student at Imperial College studying for a BSc in Mathematics with Statistics.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced his plans to make the studying of mathematics compulsory until the age of 18, making it a central part of the UK’s future education strategy. He emphasised that focusing on numerical literacy is essential for future economic and societal development. But will his plans work?
Dr Tilly Collins is a senior academic at the Centre for Environmental Policy. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on enhancing the environmental, social and economic sustainability in land-use transitions. She has a passion for entomology and makes regular media appearances to advocate for the crucial role of insects in future sustainability.
I am unashamedly and unabashedly an entomologist. I came to this realisation a bit late and only really fell in love with the insect world while doing my PhD at the Imperial College campus at Silwood Park as a decade-delayed mature student. My field work there was spent estimating insect numbers (especially of aphids) in willow plantations and listening to the hum and thrum of the array of life around me.
This was the start of my lifelong passion for working with insects, and spreading what I know to others so that, together, we can build an insect-positive future.
A Silwood Park student team became the champions of a national wildlife competition where they competed to identify as many mammals as possible. Max Khoo from the MSc Ecology, Evolution and Conservation course takes us through the tools of animal investigation that allowed them to emerge victorious!
Ioanna Morianou recently completed her PhD (MRC DTP), at the Department of Life Sciences (Crisanti Lab). Here, she talks about her work as R&D Team Lead at Biocentis, innovating genetic tools to control agricultural pests, as well as the genetic strategies she utilised to help fight malaria.
Ciaran Jones and Matthew Acevski are final-year MSci students from the Department of Physics who helped model aspects of the JUICE mission, launching on 13 April, which will explore the icy moons orbiting Jupiter. In this blog post, they tell us the science behind Imperial’s instrument aboard the mission: JMAG.
By Ciaran Jones and Matthew Acevski
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission promises to be one of the most exciting feats in space exploration. Due to launch on 13 April 2023 onboard Arianespace’s Ariane 5 rocket, the spacecraft will use the gravitational fields of Venus and Earth to accelerate towards the outer Solar System. We expect JUICE to reach the Jupiter system by the early 2030s.
The key scientific objectives of JUICE are to characterise three of Jupiter’s moons: Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto to determine their potential habitability. We believe these moons contain liquid water, in the form of saltwater oceans, beneath their icy surfaces. And we know that water, as we know it on Earth, is a prerequisite for life to succeed. However, predictions for the thicknesses of these oceans are on the order of hundreds of kilometres – significantly more than Earth’s (a few kilometres).
Sanjeevani Panditharatne is a PhD student in the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group in the Department of Physics. She writes to us from the icy mountains of Andøya, Norway, where she is weathering snow storms to study how cirrus clouds affect the Earth’s warming.
By Sanjeevani Panditharatne
I’m part of a team of three who have headed to Andøya, a remote Norwegian island inside the Arctic circle to better understand the link between high-altitude ice clouds and their climate impact within the far-infrared region!
Abigail Croker is a PhD Student in the Centre for Environmental Policy, funded by the SSCP DTP, Grantham Institute, and affiliated with the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society. In this post, she tells us about the challenges the world faces when tackling wildfires in the era of climate change. Her fieldwork in the Tsavo Conservation Area in Kenya tells us that we need to look beyond the Global North for fire management practices.
The Royal College of Science Union (RSCU) is launching 2023’s Science Challenge – an annual competition open to Imperial undergraduates and Master’s students, as well as high school students in their last four years of school. It invites participants to create compelling and entertaining pieces of science communication. We talked to Vanessa Madu, a final year student from the Department of Mathematics and this year’s RSCU Science Challenge Chair.
Researchers from the Plasma Physics Group talk about how 2022’s biggest fusion breakthrough affects their research at Imperial College London, and how their simulations may one day help scientists achieve commercial fusion energy.
By Aidan Crilly and Brian Appelbe
Nuclear fusion dominated headlines around the world last week, but our plasma physics work at Imperial College London has been a source of excitement for scientists interested in fundamental physics as well as those hoping for a breakthrough in fusion energy.