EMUA Conference 2015
EMUA Conference 2015
The East Midlands Universities Association (EMUA) host an annual conference for students from across the 8 Universities to participate in and attend.
The 2015 EMUA Student Conference took place on Thursday 3rd September at the University of Lincoln
The theme of the 2015 conference was Impact & Collaboration, with the aim to underpin and explore the growing demands of the impact agenda and its relationship with collaborative and partnership-based research. Students were asked to think how their research might have the potential to tackle real life challenges of government, industry and wider society, and in doing so how might they design and build their research and partnerships to best impact upon those challenges? How do they ensure their impact practices and skills are effective and of the highest quality, and importantly how partnership might lead to transformation and change?
The speakers were asked to engage with perspectives from explorative to methodological, through to case studies and practical examples which engage with the theme of Impact & Collaboration. And present their papers and posters under the following broad themes:
- Co-production of Research
- Influencing Policy & Practice
- Communicating Collaborative Research
- Impact & Collaboration: A Discipline Specific Focus
A keynote speech “Scholarship and the many faces of Impact” was presented by University of Lincoln Senior Lecture Helen Zulch. Helen is a veterinarian and European Specialist in Veterinary Behavioural Medicine. She is a senior lecturer in clinical animal behaviour in the School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln and an Honorary Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham School of Veterinary Medicine and Science. Helen has worked in the field of companion animal behaviour for over 13 years and currently lectures on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at the University of Lincoln. She also consults in the University of Lincoln’s Animal Behaviour Referral Clinic. Her research interests include problem prevention in pets, olfaction in dogs and the sciences explaining learning and their implications for training animals
The morning and afternoon sessions comprised of student presentations, where nine students from across the East Midlands Universities Association explored diverse topics through the delivery of fifteen minute presentations with time for questions after each presentation. A total of 27 presentations took place on the day with a poster session comprising of 10 posters during the lunch break.
The event was a huge success with attendance of over 70 students from all Universities, students were asked to provide feedback on the benefits of such an event and the opportunities they felt it presented them.
“Excellent opportunity to meet people from different fields”
“Each presenter had 15 minutes and 15 minutes only, which is effective. It challenges presenter’s presentation skills and the message is put across”
“I feel inspired by the range of subject areas and enjoyed hearing about them”
“Meeting other PhD students is what I enjoyed the most”
“Really good networking opportunities thank you!”
“I enjoyed the opportunity to present my work. I also found very inspiring the presentation from Dr Mooney and Dr Zulch. And the experience of watching the 3 minute thesis has made me think that I need to summarise my research!”
“So good to meet so many different people and hear about such varied research”
“It was very supportive and made me feel more confident about presenting at a similar event in the future”
Plans are already taking place for the 2016 EMUA Conference.
