Month: January 2012

Imperial Festival – 11-12 May 2012

The Imperial Festival, due to become an annual event, will offer staff the opportunity to showcase their work to the public through hands-on demonstrations, mass experiments, lectures, debates, competitions, installations and a range of other activities. A marquee will be available with dedicated space for each department to engage with visitors including family, friends, colleagues, alumni, funders, policy makers and the media.

Please save the dates 11-12 May in your 2012 diary. For further details, visit: www.imperial.ac.uk/festival

Feedback invited on catering and amenity offer on South Kensington Campus

Feasibility study reviewing space on Level 0 Sherfield Building including Holland Club

Staff and students are invited to offer input to a feasibility study, which will consider how the space on Level 0 at the western end of the Sherfield Building could be optimised to provide social facilities and amenities to members of the Imperial College community.

Portfolio Review Board (PRB) took this decision in order to address a growing concern over our ability to deliver a good experience on campus for all staff and students.   Alongside outstanding facilities for academic activities, the College aims to provide high-quality services and social spaces to meet the needs of the community, for example common rooms and catering outlets.   On the South Kensington Campus, these have reached saturation point.   In 2010-11, the College provided catering services to a footfall of 2.5 million and was still unable to meet demand.   Student feedback has also highlighted that taught postgraduates would welcome more appropriate common room provision on campus.

The feasibility study will explore how the space on Level 0 of Sherfield could be used to help address the issues above.   The study will include a review of the space currently occupied by the Holland Club, which has a floor area comparable to that of the Senior Common Room, and will consider:

–       what additional catering and amenities would best serve the needs of staff and students on the South Kensington Campus;

–       whether any new facilities should be open to all members of the community or to just a segment;

–       how the ethos of the Holland Club might be maintained within any new facilities.

The feasibility study will be led by the Director of Commercial Services, Jane Neary, working with Building Projects.

To offer input, please email catering.projects@imperial.ac.uk or post a comment below.

The Portfolio Review Board will review the results in Q2 2012 and determine next steps for the project.

Principal of the Faculty of Medicine

Professor Dermot Kelleher, currently the Vice-Provost for Medical Affairs and Head of the School of Medicine at Trinity College Dublin, has accepted appointment as Principal of the Faculty of Medicine, with effect from 1 October 2012. He will join the Faculty as of 1 July 2012. He will succeed Professor Sir Anthony Newman Taylor who has been Principal since December 2010.

Professor Kelleher graduated in medicine from Trinity College Dublin in 1978, and subsequently completed specialist training in gastroenterology. In 1986 he received a Fogarty Scholarship funding a research fellowship at University of California San Diego. Professor Kelleher returned to Trinity in 1989 as the Wellcome Senior Fellow in Clinical Science and was appointed Professor of Clinical Medicine in 2001. In 2006 he was appointed to his current position as Head of the School of Medicine and Vice-Provost for Medical Affairs.

His research has considered the immune response to many of the leading causes of infectious disease worldwide, and he is the author of over 200 publications and 14 patents. A Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Royal College of Physicians, Trinity College Dublin, and the American Gastroenterology Association, he was awarded the 2011 Conway Medal by the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland.