Prof. Ursula Martin and Dr Ian Griffiths have each been awarded an MPLS Impact Award for 2017-18. The MPLS (Mathematical, Physical, Engineering and Life Sciences Division at the University of Oxford) Impact Awards scheme aims to foster and raise awareness of impact by rewarding it at a local level.
Ursula's award is for Public Engagement in connection with the 2015 celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Ada Lovelace's birth. This included exhibits at many museums (including the National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park, the Science Museum and the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley) as well as an issue of a children's computing magazine developed in collaboration with QMUL (Queen Mary University of London) and distributed to UK schools to encourage programming.
Ian's award is for Non-Commercial Impact, and is in recognition of his work with researchers at IIT Kharagpur on the modelling and improvement of filters to remove arsenic from water supplies in India. This work is funded by GCRF (the UK Global Challenge Research Fund) and also supported by UNICEF which is now installing community-scale filters in India. Although it falls outside the definition of the category, Ian is also working with three companies (Dyson, Gore and Pall Corporation) to improve their filters for various purposes.
These awards, which include a £1000 payment, will be presented at the MPLS Winter Reception on February 6th.