Dear staff,
With Semester 2 examinations ending last Saturday, it’s noticeably quieter on campus this week. Nevertheless, there’s still quite a lot of events and activities planned across UQ prior to the Christmas/New Year holiday season, which is now just over 4 weeks away.
Most notably, of course, we will hold the ‘UQ Thanks You’ staff appreciation events at Herston on 29 November; St Lucia on 2 December; and Gatton on 6 December. If you haven’t confirmed your attendance yet, I’d urge to register now to help with event planning and catering.
We will also celebrate the contributions of staff at the 2022 UQ Awards for Excellence ceremony next Thursday, 1 December. You can read about the nominees on the Awards website now.
December Graduations
Our Gatton and St Lucia campuses will also spring back to life in early- to mid-December with 23 graduation ceremonies planned across nine days. We’re expecting to confer degrees on approximately 9,000 students from the 8th to 17th of December – and we will also present Honorary Awards to eight outstanding individuals.
We sent an email to academic staff in late October inviting them to attend relevant graduation ceremonies to help celebrate with our graduating cohort. If you received this invitation, I’d urge you to register your attendance over the next week, given how much our graduates appreciate seeing our staff on the stage.
The Queensland Commitment Match
Due to the careful stewardship of long-term endowed funds, we were in the position to announce last week that we will match any philanthropic gifts of more $50,000 that are made specifically for needs-based scholarships at UQ.
We’re calling this initiative The Queensland Commitment Match. The purpose of this new initiative is to grow our endowment fund, so that we can offer many more scholarships and create momentum towards our 2032 goal of helping to remove the financial, personal, and geographical barriers that often deter Queensland students from coming to study at UQ.
2022 Highly Cited Researchers list
With the release last week of the 2022 Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers list, I’m delighted to report that UQ now has more highly cited researchers than any other Australian university.
This year, 42 UQ researchers made the ‘HiCi’ list (three of them were recognised in two categories), with nine UQ researchers making the list for the first time. I would like to express my warm congratulations to each of them on this very prestigious, global recognition of their work.
To be named on the list, researchers must be ranked in the top 1% of researchers globally, as measured by citations in the world’s leading journals over the past decade.
Australian Academy of Humanities
I was delighted to hear yesterday that Professors Clint Bracknell, Deborah Brown, and Felicity Meakins have been elected as Fellows of the Australian Academy of Humanities (AAH) and UQ’s Chancellor Peter Varghese AO was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Academy. Congratulations to our new Fellows of AAH – this is a very significant honour. In addition, Emeritus Professors Fred D’Agostino and Joanne Tompkins have been elected as new members of the Academy’s Council.
Other recent awards and grants
My congratulations to our colleagues from across the UQ community who have been recognised with other significant awards or grants over the past couple of weeks.
Earlier this week, UQ received two awards at the 2022 Engagement Australia Excellence Awards. The UQ ChangeMakers program won the award for ‘Excellence in Student and Alumni Engagement’; and Danielle Harvey from the UQ Art Museum was awarded for ‘Outstanding Leadership in Engagement’.
UQ was also recognised at the 2022 Australasian Green Gown Awards last week, with an award in the ‘Next Generation Learning and Skills’ category for the UQ Carbon Literacy Program.
The Federal Government has awarded UQ a $4.3 million grant as part of the first round of the new National Soil Carbon Innovation Challenge. The grant will be used to develop high resolution maps of soil organic carbon, in partnership with FarmLab, Ziltek, AgriCircle and the University of Aberdeen.
Cancer Council Queensland has just announced that it will invest $2 million over the next four years to support a research project led by Professor Andrew Barbour that is seeking to develop improved methods of precision medicine for the treatment of oesophageal cancer.
Three UQ researchers were awarded a total of $2.4 million last week under the ARC’s Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) scheme – Associate Professor Jeffrey Harmer, Professor Bostjan Kobe, and Professor Lianzhou Wang.
It was also announced last week that another three UQ researchers had been successful in their applications for NHMRC Postgraduate Scholarships – Dr Karen Liddle, Dr Natacha Omer, and Georgia Carstensen.
And, finally, my congratulations to Susan Beetson, from the School of ITEE, who was last week recognised by Science & Technology Australia as one of our nation’s emerging STEM talents when she was included on the latest Superstars of STEM list.
I hope you enjoy the rest of the week.
With best wishes
Debbie
