TSM CDT Student prizes (Part 3 of 3)

The winners of this year's Life of the CDT prizes are announced.

The winners of this year’s Life of the CDT prizes are:

The Julian Walsh Prize for Outstanding Contribution to the Life of the CDT 

Lars Blumenthal

Lars is awarded The Julian Walsh Prize for Outstanding Contribution to the Life of the TSM-CDT. This is partly for his role in 'Project X', a project to learn about app development and to develop apps in collaboration with other CDTs. Based on the interest and enthusiasm within his cohort for app development, he co-organised an Android app development course for PhD students from the TSM CDT and CDTs in Sheffield, Cambridge and Bristol. While this initial course was not as effective as hoped for, the groups persisted, and now two apps are under development: one to provide a mobile phone friendly interface to High Performance Computing services such as Imperial's own; another intended as a way of capturing knowledge and experience within an organisation, inspired by a request from Rolls Royce. Both groups are active, are recruiting new members, and look forward to presenting their initial efforts at the Imperial Festival in 2017. Lars also made a highly effective contribution to CDT life as his cohort's first representative on the TSM Operations Board. In addition to this, he has shown himself willing to volunteer for everything - representing Imperial PhD students as part of an external review of the High Performance Computing service, for example - while also being prepared to question how and why things are done, working effectively to make the CDT a better place for all.

Major Contribution to the Life of the CDT prize:

Chris Ablitt, Jacek Golebiowski, Iacopo Rovelli, Rob Charlton

Chris and Rob are awarded a Life of the CDT prize for leading the TSM CDT's Pint of Science team in 2016, together with coordinators Jacek and Iacopo. The events this team organised and publicised over three days were either sold out or close to being sold out, and through these, hundreds of people found out more about contemporary science and technology, possibilities for the future, and several potential ethical issues. The informal event setting generated high quality discussions in extended question and answer sessions, with a chance for attendees also to experiment with hands-on demonstrations and to be tested with a pub quiz with a difference. The title for the series was Atoms To Galaxies: the result was a stellar performance, and the organizing team delivered an outstanding events series at the George IV pub in Chiswick, a larger venue than in previous years, and a platform to build on for this successful outreach series for the future.

Jonas Verschueren

Jonas is awarded a Life of the CDT prize partly for his role in 'Project X', a project to learn about app development and to develop apps in collaboration with other CDTs. Based on the interest and enthusiasm within his cohort for app development, Jonas co-organised an Android app development course for PhD students from the TSM CDT and CDTs in Sheffield, Cambridge and Bristol. While this initial course was not as effective as hoped for, the groups persisted, and now two apps are under development: one to provide a mobile phone friendly interface to High Performance Computing services such as Imperial's own; another intended as a way of capturing knowledge and experience within an organisation, inspired by a request from Rolls Royce. Both groups are active, are recruiting new members, and look forward to presenting their initial efforts at the Imperial Festival in 2017. Jonas also made a highly effective contribution to CDT life as his cohort's second representative on the TSM Operations Board.

Drew Pearce 

Drew is awarded a Life of the CDT prize for multiple significant contributions made to the life of the TSM CDT over the last three years. Most notably, Drew led the organisation of Hermes 2016 as Chair, including seeking funding for the event, recruiting the speakers, facilitating international participation and a multitude of other aspects of the successful organisation and running of the event, which was a great success. At the same time as organising Hermes 2016, Drew also served on the editorial team for the Annual Reports for two years running, and was very active in the running of the Pint of Science event.