VC's week - 21 January 2013 - High Fliers, VC's Health & Safety Awards, and KRISTAL
A regular update from Vice-Chancellor Professor Michael Arthur.
A welcome start to the week arrived in the shape of the High Fliers report which revealed that we’re again in the Top 10 universities most targeted by graduate employers. This hugely influential report studies the graduate recruitment of 100 of the UK’s best-known, most successful employers including the Civil Service, Tesco and Saatchi & Saatchi. I was particularly pleased to see that we’re ranked ahead of King’s, Imperial and University College London (UCL)! Our placing is a great endorsement and shows that key employers really value the skills and attributes of our Leeds graduates.
I attended one of my favourite events in the University calendar last week – namely the Vice-Chancellor’s Health & Safety Awards. Now in their fourth year, these Awards highlight the great work that colleagues across the University are doing to make the workplace a safer environment. They also act as a reminder of just how important health, safety and wellbeing are and the fantastic progress we have made in this area.
Choosing the winners was incredibly hard as the standard was so high, and every one of the entrants deserves our thanks and congratulations. There isn’t enough space to mention all the winners – you can find the details on the For Staff home page – but I would like to give a special mention to the winners of the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Health and Safety, the Work experience participants team from the Faculty of Engineering. They devised a new approach to organising work experience activities for schoolchildren, so that the young people can enjoy a week-long programme of different activities that are safe but exciting. The Safety Office, which co-ordinates the programme, even trains the children in occupational health and safety principles, giving them a recognised qualification for their CVs. It’s an inspirational project which will affect hundreds of young people in the years to come and will, I am sure, attract them to come and study at the University.
During a visit to Research and Innovation Service (RIS) I was delighted to learn that KRISTAL – a new IT application – has finally, dare I say it, crystallised! Developed by ISS, the Research and Innovation Service and faculties, KRISTAL* (the Knowledge Research Innovation System at Leeds) will enable us to manage our research and innovation grant portfolio more efficiently. The project was incredibly complex but the result is a ‘one stop shop’ for proposal creation, grant management and reporting. Well done to everyone involved in creating such an impressive and valuable system.
*Please note that KRISTAL is still undergoing final testing and will be rolled out across the faculties and schools during the next couple of weeks. All staff will receive communications from their faculty research and innovation office or their directors of research in the next few days.
Send your comments to vcweek@leeds.ac.uk
Posted in: My Week