UGS Postgraduate Research Festival 2022

Read on to hear about our 2022 festival: our keynotes, our winners, and how you can join us in looking back at our packed programme of keynote lectures and original research presentations.

Our Postgraduate Research Festival is the biggest celebration of postgraduate research at the University of Birmingham, giving postgraduates from different disciplines the opportunity to share their work with the wider University and beyond. The Festival took place on 16^th and 17^th June 2022 and featured two key note speakers, our annual Research Poster Conference, Images of Research exhibition, and Awards Ceremony.

This year, our festival theme was ‘Civic Researchers in Action’, celebrating Postgraduate Researchers making a difference in their field and working with local people, policy makers, businesses, and charities with the aim of bettering the experience of communities.

We welcomed not only Postgraduate Researchers to our events but staff members, postgraduate taught students, and undergraduates interested in postgraduate study.

If you missed any of our events, or want to take a look back at some of your favourites, you can view all entries to our Research Poster Exhibition here, and explore our Images of Research gallery here. Both events get our postgraduate community to think creatively about their work and engage a wider audience, transforming the complex ideas of their research into a single image or compelling poster.

You can also listen to our Keynote Speaker from Day 2 of our Postgraduate Research Festival. Andrew Beggs is a Professor of Cancer Genetics & Surgery at the University of Birmingham. He is currently the MDS Director of Research Impact and Engagement and co-lead of the section of Translational Biology and Genomics within the Institute of Cancer & Genomic Sciences. Andrew will talk about new methodology developed during the COVID pandemic, working with industry and how the pandemic has transformed how we perform research.

We finished the Festival with our UGS Awards Ceremony, where we announced the winners of our Research Poster Competition, Images of Research Competition, and Three-Minute Thesis competition.

Congratulations to all of our winners across all five Colleges! We’re delighted to share them with you below:

College of Arts and Law

Research Poster Competition:
- - College of Arts and Law Special Award: Arbaz Muzaffer – ‘How free are we? Sneak peeking into our right to self-determination’
Images of Research:
Michael K. O’Rourke Best Publication Award:
- - Andrew Patton - ‘Greek Catenae and the "Western" Order of the Gospels’

College of Social Sciences

Research Poster Competition:
- - Overall Winner: Unaysah Mogra – ‘Postcodes, Poverty and Diversity Myths’
  - College of Social Sciences Special Award: Hanna Head – ‘Shifting Approaches; Policy Constellations as a New Perspective’
Michael K. O’Rourke Best Publication Award:
- - Joseph Ward and Bradley Ward - ‘From Brexit to COVID-19: The Johnson Government, Executive Centralisation and Authoritarian Populism'

College of Engineering and Physical Sciences

Research Poster Competition:
- - College of Engineering and Physical Sciences Special Award: Nora Horanyi – ‘See it, Say it, Crop it!’
  - People’s Choice Award: Miguel Alena-Rodriguez - ‘A novel (and much needed) approach for Cancer detection’
Michael K O’Rourke Best Publication Award:
- - Krishna M Gokhale ‘Data extraction for epidemiological research (DExtER): a novel tool for automated clinical epidemiology studies'
Three Minute Thesis:
- - Judges Winner: Tim Williams - ‘Reducing Risk at 30,000ft’
    - Tim will go on to represent the University of Birmingham at the national Vitae and international U21 competitions! Watch Tim's winning presentation here.
  - People’s Choice Award: Osaze Omoregbe - ‘Carbon Utilisation for the Actualisation of the Zero-emission Goal'. Watch Osaze's winning presentation here.
Images of Research:
- - Judges Award Runner Up: Sebastian Gilbert – ‘Human vs Machine: Finding Art in the Arteries’
  - People's Choice Winner: Yichang Yan – ‘Make it Happen’
  - People's Choice Award Runner Up: Abigail Wright – ‘Of Mice and Men’

College of Medical and Dental Sciences

Research Poster Competition:
- - Third Place Overall: Rebecca Bedford – ‘Metals in the Fight Against Ovarian Cancer’
  - College of Medical and Dental Sciences Special Award: Luca Panconi – ‘Topological Data Analysis to allow the Identification and Segmentation of Diverse Cell Types’
Michael K O’Rourke Best Publication Award:
- - Tiffany Gooden - ‘The risk of mental illness in people living with HIV in the UK: a propensity score-matched cohort study’
Three Minute Thesis:
- - Judges Runner-up: James Glasbey - ‘Wound Healing 3.0 - Shortening the path to recovery from surgery’. Watch James's winning presentation here.

College of Life and Environmental Sciences

Research Poster Competition
- - Second Place Overall: Prachi Shah - ‘Using natural language processing to semi-automate indexing of stranger sex offences onto crime linkage databases’
  - College of Life and Environmental Sciences Special Award: Delfina Bilello - ‘Friendships and self-harm in young people: a retrospective study of friends’ experiences’
Michael K O’Rourke Best Publication Award:
- - Karn Vohra – ‘Rapid rise in premature mortality due to anthropogenic air pollution in fast-growing tropical cities from 2005 to 2018’
Three Minute Thesis:
- - Judges Runner-up: Nine Douwes Dekker - ‘Will the soils of forests trap enough CO2 in the future?’ Watch Nine's winning presentation here.
Excellence in Doctoral Research Supervision
- - Dr. Jennifer Cook (Psychology)