Executive Dean's Message - July 2019
Dear colleagues,
Lovely to see so many of you at the recent mid-year graduations. What wonderful events to celebrate the success of our students and the outstanding contributions of our academic and professional staff. It’s also great to see so many students back on campus as Semester 2 kicks off.
We contributed to another successful global leadership public engagement event on 18 July at Customs House. The topic was 'Can we keep the next pandemic at bay?', with excellent talks from Nigel Perkins (SVS), David Paterson (UQCCR, Medicine) and Ian Henderson (IMB). It was a really great event, with some images below.
As you will have seen, we now have a draft ‘user brief’ for the proposed Science Precinct. This has been developed through the generous contribution of over 90 academic and professional staff across UQ. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on this document, which will inform the next stage of the approval process as we head towards the design phase. Please take a look and let us know if there are any critical elements that we have missed or if you have any general or specific feedback. Please provide feedback to Sue Lowrey preferably by Wednesday, 7 August noting that input will continue to be welcomed as the planning process continues.
The Vice-Chancellor’s all-staff address was inspiring as always. In case you missed it will become available here.
Thanks to the more than 160 people who attended the recent Semester 1 Faculty of Science Board meeting. The minutes of the meeting can be found on our Faculty SharePoint site.
One of the actions from this meeting was to invite our Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Bronwyn Harch to tell us about the future plans for the UQ Global Change Institute, and how we can engage with these. We are greatly looking forward to welcoming Brownyn to address us on Monday 19 August. Visit the RSVP page for more information and to secure your spot.
Other highlights for me in the last few weeks have been a trip to China to discuss opportunities to collaborate in teaching and research with colleagues at The University of Peking and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I talked to almost a hundred UQ alumni in Beijing and supported workshops delivered to our early and mid-career researchers on engaging with industry by Alternate Futures.
The Faculty leadership group also met to review our strategic plan and to consider priorities and enablers for the next year. I look forward to sharing the report and action items over the coming weeks.
Kind regards,
Professor Melissa Brown
Executive Dean
