Issue 2

Head of Department's Report to SOUE    1 October 2001 - 30 September 2002

Rodney Eatock Taylor

Research

In the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, the Department was once again awarded the top classification, 5*A. This corresponds to international excellence in the majority of our research and the highest band in terms of proportion of research active staff. The assessors noted in connection with this Department "the high level of inter-disciplinary work and the outstanding success in obtaining industrial funding and the formation of spin-out companies".

On the wider University level, Oxford can boast of having more researchers in world class (5 and 5*) departments than any other university, and the highest research income.

The Department has been successful in competing to participate in major new national initiatives, such as the Research Councils' Basic Technology Research Programme and the e-Science initiative which results from the government's spending review in 2001. We are also a major partner in the Doctoral Training Centre established in Oxford as part of the EPSRC's programme at the Life Sciences Interface. Engineering Science's involvement is primarily through the Interdisciplinary Research Centre ("From Medical Images and Signals to Clinical Information"), directed by Mike Brady.

The new Information Engineering Building project, on which I reported last year, is now moving forward. An additional £1.5 million has been contributed by the Wolfson Foundation, leaving us with £2.3 million to complete the funding of the vision. Construction is due to start in Spring 2003, on the site of the Victorian houses between the Jenkin and E & T buildings. When opened in summer of 2004 it will bring together research in robotics, medical imaging, signal processing and pattern analysis, communications and displays, control, and manufacturing systems analysis.

Significant Awards

• Professor Mike Brady has been selected for a Royal Society - Wolfson Research Merit Award. Thirteen were awarded nationally in the second round of this scheme.

• The University conferred the following titles on members of the Department in 2002:

  Professor		Reader
  Alistair Borthwick		Paul Buckley
  Arthur Dexter		Janet Efstathiou
  Alison Noble		Robert Field
  Gilliane Sills		Steve Roberts
  		Paul Smith

• Dr Joanna Ashbourn has been awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship, to support her work in Dr Paul Smith's group.

• Royal Academy of Engineering Leadership Awards:

  Fiona Howarth (St. Catherine's), Anthony Man (Wadham) and Alexander Quayle (Lincoln) are amongst the winners of the Academy's prestigious national competition for second year M.Eng. students. As well as receiving a financial award, they join the Academy's Engineering Leadership programme, which provides professional development advice and training designed to promote leadership qualities.

• Emmy Award:

  The Boujou Automated Camera Tracker, using software based on research into computer vision by Professor Andrew Zisserman and Dr Andrew Fitzgibbon in this Department, was awarded a Primetime Emmy at the 2002 Engineering and Interactive Television Awards ceremony, held in Hollywood on 21 August. "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" are among the films to have benefited from this technology, which is marketed by the company 2d3.

• The IMechE 2001 George Stephenson Prize was awarded to David Hills, David Nowell and Ludwig Lummer (Rolls-Royce) for their paper "A combined testing and modelling approach to the prediction of fretting fatigue performance of splined shafts".

Academic Staff Movements

• Professor Roger Ainsworth has been elected as Master of St. Catherine's College.

• Professor Peter Dobson has been appointed to the post of Director of the University's Begbroke Business and Science Park.

  (Both Roger and Peter thereby relinquish their posts in the Department, but both intend to continue some research activities with us).

• Dr Mark Cannon has been appointed to a University Lecturership with a Fellowship at St. John's, as from 1 October 2002. He was previously employed on a Temporary Lecturership funded by Invensys plc, with a fellowship at St. Peter's.

• Dr Julia Stegemann was appointed to a Departmental lecturership as from 1 January 2002. The post is held in association with CEH Wallingford.

• Four Departmental Lecturers left during the course of the year: Dr Shengmin Guo, Dr Raja Ghosh, Dr Jannette Fransden and Dr Neil Townsend. Reappointments are being made.

• Mr Alan Knight and Mr Peter Rockett retired from their positions as Design Engineers, latterly as members of the Teaching and Design Support Group. Alan had been with the Department continuously since 1967.

Other News

• League tables. This is the year to take notice of these! In 2002 Oxford was for the first time ranked the top university in the Times Good University Guide. The Department was placed first in August 2002 in the Guardian University Guide's teaching rankings in the General Engineering category (which comprises 38 universities including Cambridge).

• The Royal Academy of Engineering Annual Soirée and Exhibition was hosted by the Department on June 26 2002. The Vice-Chancellors of both Oxford (Sir Colin Lucas) and Cambridge (Sir Alec Broers) attended, the latter in the role of President of the RAEng.

• Two of our 4th year undergraduates are spending the whole of the academic year 2002-2003 at Princeton University, under the new exchange scheme which we intend to expand in future years.

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