Times Higher Education Awards winners on path to greater success

University of the Year

Ulster University will “walk the walk” to prove that staff and academics are as important as recent expansion projects which saw the institution crowned University of the Year, according to its vice-chancellor.

Ulster won the top prize at the Times Higher Education Awards 2024 after judges praised the completion of its new Belfast site and the development of its Derry/Londonderry campus, which “demonstrated the university’s growing influence and status”.

“There’s been a sense for a number of years now that Ulster University is kind of a university that’s been a bit too good at hiding its light under a bushel,” said vice-chancellor Paul Bartholomew. “We’re fantastic on a whole bunch of things but tend to be quite modest.”

Despite local roots through its three distinct campuses in the capital, Coleraine and Derry, Professor Bartholomew, who has been in the role since August 2020, said the institution was strategically a “university of and for the world”.

With domestic student numbers in Northern Ireland capped, he said winning the award could help attract more international postgraduate students, which cash-strapped competitors will be envious of.

Also differentiating them from many other UK institutions, Professor Bartholomew said Ulster has no plans for any job cuts and was “holding the line” to fulfil the important role it plays politically, socially and economically.

“I’m not in the business of downscaling at the moment,” he added. “Do we have some financial pain compared to where we were? A bit, but it’s not enormous, we’re doing OK, and given that we will live up to our responsibilities in terms of what it is that the university does.”

Professor Bartholomew said Ulster’s strategy of “people, place and partnership”, which was central to its winning bid, was one that “lives and doesn’t just go on the shelf” – but he said there can be challenges.

With new buildings – such as the £364 million relocation from Jordanstown to the Belfast city centre campus – often dominating much of the narrative, the university has to continually tell its academics and staff how important they are.

 “You have to walk the walk and be authentic; it’s not something I think that you can fake,” added Professor Bartholomew, who said the award success was a celebration of the university’s people and a recognition of their efforts.

“You have to keep saying it, but people have to know that you believe it. People talk about the university as if it’s some institution, but the truth is much simpler than that, the university is us.”

The judges also commended the securing of a €44.5 million (£37 million) investment from the Irish government for the development of Ulster’s Magee campus in Derry/Londonderry.

However, a comment piece published in The Irish News after Ulster’s awards success claimed that the university was too Belfast-centric and had failed to live up to its obligations to Derry.

“The university’s failure to invest properly in Derry has hampered the social, cultural and economic development of the city and the wider region,” wrote Tom Collins, an emeritus professor at the University of Stirling.

Professor Bartholomew said it is not a “zero-sum game” and that the investment in Belfast will reap dividends for the financial health of the university overall – which will help in its mission to further grow the Magee campus.

“We get tied to the notion that we’re a Belfast-led institution, we absolutely are not,” he said.

“Since I’ve been vice-chancellor, we’ve grown that [Magee] campus by 30 per cent and we continue to grow and we are growing when the rest of the sector is not – it’s not an easy job to be doing.”

Patrick Jack

Most Innovative Teacher of the Year

If, as Maya Angelou said, people never forget how you made them feel, then teaching is as much about the environment you create as the content you impart, according to Jenny Moffett, an educationalist at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences.

“It is about creating experiences around them where they will engage with the activities and with each other and apply what they are learning in their own context,” she said. “You have to make people feel free to step in, that it is safe to get involved.”

A vet by training, Dr Moffett came into academia via science communication, and it was the challenge of how doctors should tell a patient they don’t know something that led her and her team to create The Hidden Hospital, an immersive “escape room” style online game.

“The culture of medicine is that everybody craves certainty,” said Dr Moffett. “But the reality is it is very rare that you will get those black and white answers.”

Instead, there is often ambiguity and unpredictability in interpreting test results or judging how a patient will respond to treatment, she said, but teaching this to students has rarely been tackled head-on.

Co-designed with students, The Hidden Hospital allows participants to explore some of these themes and collaborate with each other before heading out on clinical placements.

It also draws on the story-telling power of video games but in a way that is easily replicable by anyone who has technical know-how akin to creating a PowerPoint presentation, said Dr Moffett. She hopes to roll it out to new settings in the Netherlands and Norway next year.

Tom Williams

Research Supervisor of the Year

With relatively few academic posts available to the army of PhD graduates leaving UK universities each year, the need for students to engage with other sectors during their doctoral degree has become increasingly clear. The collaborative PhD – in which academics share PhD supervisory responsibilities with experts working in other institutions – is, for many, one of the best ways to make this happen.

This year’s Research Supervisor of the Year Award recognised a pioneer in this mode of PhD delivery – Felix Driver, a historical geographer based at Royal Holloway, University of London – who has co-supervised doctoral students with partners at Kew Gardens, the Royal Geographical Society, the Science Museum, the National Maritime Museum and the British Library.

“The collaborative PhD is one of the great success stories of UK higher education and we can never celebrate it enough,” Professor Driver told Times Higher Education – a sentiment that seems to be shared by UK funding bodies, which have recently announced new PhD funding opportunities involving non-academic bodies.

Reshaping the PhD towards greater industry engagement has paid off for many of Professor Driver’s former doctoral students who have since taken leading roles in museums, academia and the Civil Service. Yet the desire of organisations to work with doctoral students also underlines the enduring power of academia’s highest research qualification, he said.

“Of the many things that universities do, the PhD is the most special,” he explained. “That is why museums, libraries, galleries and botanical gardens are keen to collaborate with universities like Royal Holloway to co-design and co-supervise doctoral research projects across the humanities and sciences.”

Jack Grove

THE Awards 2024: learn from the best in UK and Irish higher education

Outstanding Contribution to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

For disabled students entering university, available adjustments typically address spaces like lecture theatres, libraries and classrooms. “There’s a deficit across the higher education sector where there’s no formal process for accommodating reasonable adjustments within laboratories,” said Sobia Kauser, associate professor of biomedical science at the University of Bradford.

After reaching out to disability adviser Stuart Walker, the duo began to collaborate on a solution. The result is the Managing Risk for Impaired Laboratory Users system – or MaRILU, for short.

Through MaRILU, students complete an online form to describe the barriers presented by the space they’re using and the accommodations that work best – rest breaks, height adjustable benches, stools with back supports or designated laboratory demonstrators, for instance. Their contributions are entered into the MaRILU database, relevant staff are notified, and meetings are set up for students to discuss their experience and collaborate on risk assessments.

“Students are the experts on what they need,” Dr Kauser said. “By using this inclusive and co-creative approach, what we found is that the students feel a greater sense of belonging within the university. That helps with things like student attainment and student retention.”

Next, the Bradford team hope to obtain some funding in order to revamp MaRILU. They’d like to see other universities take heed, too. “We hope that our work is a catalyst for change that will help institutions to provide consistent and equitable support for disabled students in laboratory settings,” Dr Kauser said.

Emily Dixon

Outstanding Estates Team

With estates budgets being squeezed – but sustainability still high on the agenda – the need to do things differently has never been greater.

The University of Plymouth could easily have chosen to pull down three ageing buildings and rebuild them but instead has adopted a strategy of reuse: retaining the core of the old structure and redeveloping around it.

In doing so, it believes it has saved 5,000 tonnes of carbon and few would notice the difference, according to Trevor Wills, the director of estates and facilities.

“All three buildings present themselves as if they were new. Standing in front of them, you wouldn’t know we have restored an old building,” he said.

One of the sites – known as InterCity Place – was a dilapidated tower block that formed part of the Plymouth station complex, and Mr Wills said he hoped restoring it could be used as an example to others considering what to do with previously unloved landmarks.

The other two sites will host engineering and the university’s business school respectively, and the redevelopments have also been utilised to tackle another big estates challenge: how to manage the demand for space that ebbs and flows throughout the course of the week.

So, the engineering block – known as the Babbage Building – features highly specialised equipment such as a wind tunnel, but its top floor is also dedicated to general use teaching. “It makes sure it isn’t siloed for one use,” said Mr Wills.

Tom Williams