Celebrating our UofG world changers
Engineering champion
Professor of Geospatial Data Science Ana Basiri has been appointed as one of the first Engineering X Safer End of Engineered Life (SEEL) Champions by the Royal Academy of Engineering. The Champions are a group of 20 researchers in 11 different countries working in a range of industries, sectors and disciplines who are leading projects to improve the way we dismantle and dispose of engineered products and structures.
Professor Basiri will investigate and promote awareness of two underappreciated aspects of our digital lives: the legal and security implications of the ‘digital immortality’ created by our online data living on after our deaths, and the environmental footprint of our digital legacies.
Our digital lives, in the form of social media accounts and email, can be much longer than our physical lives, persisting online past the end of our physical lives. This digital legacy can result in some legal issues related to personal data protection after a user's death. As SEEL champion, Professor Basiri will engage with the public, industrial partners including Microsoft Research and Google, and policymakers in the UK and Scottish Governments to raise awareness regarding the lack of digital inheritance legislation.
She will also turn her attention to the carbon footprint of digital data, which is stored on servers which require a great deal of energy to maintain. If the internet was a country, it would be the fifth-biggest energy consumer in the world, responsible for the equivalent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire airline industry. Professor Basiri will engage with the public to raise awareness about their digital footprint and communicate the environmental impacts of digital activities in easy-to-understand language.
Knowledge exchange champion
Professor Murray Pittock has been named Knowledge Exchange Champion at the Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards 2022, for his work shaping national and local government policy on literary tourism and improving the way heritage and tourism sectors develop visitor experiences. His work on the economic impact of the poet Robert Burns secured two Scottish Parliament debates and persuaded the Scottish Government to commission his research report on the subject.
ERC grant winners
Three UofG researchers have been awarded highly prestigious European Research Council Starting Grants.
- Dr Hugo Defienne, of the School of Physics & Astronomy, has received €1.5 million for a project that builds on his existing expertise in using quantum-entangled photons for imaging, including the development of the world’s first quantum hologram. By sculpting light at the quantum level, Dr Defienne and his team will develop a new kind of microscope with unprecedented performance. It will be used as a practical tool to unravel new biological behaviours and phenomena.
- Dr Payam Gammage, of the Institute of Cancer Sciences and Group Leader at the CRUK Beatson Institute, was awarded €1.9m to carry out a five-year project to develop advanced model systems and new technologies that enable the experimental manipulation of mitochondrial DNA. The aim of the project is to reveal a precise understanding of the role these mutations play in cancer development.
- Dr Gerasimos Tsourapas, of the School of Social & Political Sciences, was awarded €1.49 million to carry out a five-year ERC project which takes migration research in a new direction. It proposes a comprehensive framework that examines the use of labour and forced migration as an instrument of foreign policy by Western and non-Western countries alike. The project focuses on the seven countries involved in the largest waves of migration into, out of, and across the Middle East: France, Germany, India, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
This article was first published March 2022.