Matters of the Moment

The MPLS Divisional Teaching Award Scheme celebrates success, and recognises innovation and/or leadership in teaching. Awards are available to all those who teach, including graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and learning support staff. The Teaching Award Scheme is administered by the MPLS Divisional Office and awards are made, on merit, across the departments by a cross-departmental panel chaired by the Associate Head of Division (Taught Degrees).

The Student Tea@11 service is starting this Monday (23rd February) at 11 am in the Common Room. We look forward to welcoming you with fresh cups of coffee, tea, and a variety of biscuits, all served efficiently by one of our student volunteers.

We hope to see many of you there to start us off strong. Can’t make it Monday? No need to worry: we’ll be there Mon-Fri from 11:00 to 11:15 am until the end of Week 9.

We are seeking mentors and projects for online research projects with Africa. This scheme matches mentors with master’s-level students in sub-Saharan Africa who are not currently enrolled in a PhD programme. Through a combination of research experience and skills training, the scheme aims to empower students to make competitive graduate applications in Africa and elsewhere. 

Professor James Naismith, Head of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences division here in Oxford will be joining our coffee morning in the Common Room on Monday 26 January from 11 am.

Please do join Jim for coffee if you can.

The Green Friday campaign  offers a 15% discount on all Oxford Merchandise gear. Additionally, for every order placed using the discount code GREEN15, The College Store will again plant two trees instead of one. To date they have planted over 5,700 trees as a direct result from orders through the store.

The discount will run from November 21 until December 1.

As part of a review into the outside appointment and conflict of interest processes we are seeking feedback from staff members.

Graduate students support the running of the department in many ways:  We would like to recognise this contribution by making a small number of awards annually. 

If you wonder where Pete has been recently, the answer is that he has been busy setting up an AI-focused company to enable high-stakes decision making without data. And he has just raised £1.6m to kick things off.

Read more

Georgina Ryan is our new MPLS ED&I Fellow. 

This is the sixth year of running the ED&I Fellowship scheme with representation from across the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences (MPLS) Division's departments.

Student Tea@11 is a student-led initiative to revitalise the daily tea, coffee, and biscuit service for everyone. 'Tea' takes place in the Common Room at 11 am. We are looking for student volunteers for this term to form a committee similar to Happy Hour, which would take over the running of the tea service.