Emily Mitchell is an applied statistician and research associate in Mathematical Sciences. We spoke to her back when she was a PhD student and asked her a few questions.

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The University of Nottingham SIAM & IMA Student Chapter (details below) held our first PGR Student showcase on Monday 9^th November.

The aim of the event was to provide an opportunity for students to practice giving talks that they will be giving at conferences or their second year talk. We planned to originally have this event in May before the summer conference season. It was also a great opportunity for the students to practice giving talks digitally as this is a first for most.

There were five excellent talks from Connor Rourke, Sunil Modhara, Ines Krissaane, Harry Wells and Benjamin Morris. These students were from a range of different research groups and it was great to see the variety of research that goes on in the department. Each talk was either 15 or 20 minutes in length, allowing for 5 minutes of questions from the audience. The event was well attended and we had lots of great questions for the speakers. We also provided optional peer review for the speakers to get feedback from some of the committee members on their talk and we hope this was useful for the speakers.

We hope to run this event again in the future if students want to practice talks for conferences later on in the year.

What is SIAM?

SIAM is the Society for Industrial and Applied Maths which is a global organisation based in America. They have 14,500+ members worldwide. There are 21 Activity Groups from Algebraic Geometry to Life Sciences to Supercomputing that have their own mailing lists to announce conferences and job opportunities.  There are 14 SIAM sections that host their own events including the UK and Rep. of Ireland section that holds an annual meeting and annual student conference. There are also 18 highly esteemed journals that SIAM produces.

As the University of Nottingham has a Student Chapter, along with 196 other Universities worldwide, any student is given free membership to SIAM. They also provide student travel awards to conferences.

What is the IMA?

The IMA is the Institute of Mathematics and its applications and is a society based in the UK. They have 8 journals and host many conferences, talks and workshops. They also provide a careers service and research grants. They fund Teacher Training Scholarships too for mathematics teachers. As a student, the IMA provides a free eStudent Newsletter and membership is £10 a year.

The Student Chapter

The Student Chapter is run by a committee of PGR students. We receive annual funding from both SIAM and the IMA to host events for students. This has included lectures, careers talks and film nights. We require at least four roles in the committee: President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer. If you would like any more information regarding joining SIAM or the IMA or about the Chapter and its events please visit our Sharepoint at uniofnottm.sharepoint.com/sites/SIAM_IMA_Student_Chapter, follow us on Twitter @UniOfNotts_SIAM or email us at siam@nottingham.ac.uk.

Article written by Abigail Cocks – University of Nottingham SIAM & IMA Student Chapter President 

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Introducing the digital champions

Hope has been instrumental in changing attitudes to FGM in the northern Tanzania, and we are working with them in this research project to better understand this practice. In 2019, Hope worked with Crowd2Map, HOTOSM and officials in the Serengeti district to train a woman in each of 87 villages in the region to use a smartphone as part of a project called WomenConnect. They were trained on using the phone’s camera and map and learnt how to report cases of FGM a free app called ODK on their phones.

For these women, this was their first time using a smartphone and using it in such remote locations with poor connectivity and access to electricity for charging is often challenging. But the women were selected for their community leadership and work tirelessly to protect the girls in their villages from FGM and educate other villagers on the risks of the practice, as well as advocating against Gender Based Violence more widely.

The digital champions are rising to the challenge and monitor girls at risk. So far they have stepped in and made direct interventions to prevent 25 girls from being cut, as well as persuading many more families to abandon the practice.

Here you can watch interviews with four of the champions, Tabu, Sikujua, Hulda and Deborah.

The digital champions at the survey training in Mugumu.

Village Connections

Understanding how the villages are connected with each other is important to finding the villages where girls are most at risk. Connections between villages can mean roads and paths, but we’re also interested in villages which share resources. Sharing water sources, markets and schools can help us build a picture of the community and how information is shared between them. Schools and education are the best way of protecting girls from being cut, so finding which villages share schools can tell us about the safety of the girls in these villages.

Personal connections between villages give us a vibrant picture of the life the villagers are leading and tell us how practices such as FGM propagate through the region. We’re interested in hearing from the digital champions if they have friends in other villages, or if it’s common for girls to move away from the village after getting married.

Working out the lay of the land

In late October, some of the digital champions travelled to Mugumu town to learn about our project and be trained on how to fill out the survey. This was a really good start to the project, and soon after returning to their villages, they started telling us about their village and the connections to other villages nearby. Seeing the photos they sent us of their villages was the most exciting part. We quickly noticed that each village had a pharmacy and the quality of the pharmacies was similar for all villages. However, we were surprised by how different the water sources are in each village.

Examples of water pumps in different villages.

Examples of water pumps in different villages.

Examples of water pumps in different villages.

We’re now building up a network of the villages and to help us understand which villages share which resources.

The muddy path ahead

Not everything has been smooth so far. Soon after we started the project, the rainy season began. As many of the roads to the villages are dirt roads, they quickly became muddy. This has made reaching the villages much more challenging for hope staff and training the champions a slower process. Tanzania is in the middle of election fever too, and the digital champions have had some difficulties accessing the internet and the WhatsApp group they use to talk to each other. We’re not letting this hold us back, and we’re persevering through these challenges.

The next step in the survey is for the digital champions to ask other people in their villages about their views. We’re very grateful to their digital champions for taking part in this project and for the support they provide to women and girls in their villages.

Photos from two of the villages in the Serengeti district.

Photos from two of the villages in the Serengeti district.

This article was written by Rowland Seymour, Madeleine Ellis and Katie Severn of the University of Nottingham.

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While many activities and events have been cancelled in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, our researchers and PhD students find ways to continue with engaging the public in mathematics.  We have spoken to PhD students Heather Collis and Sarah Brown as well as Assistant Professor Katie Severn about what outreach activities they have been able to do during this time.

Sarah and Katie are part of the ‘I’m a Mathematician: Circle Zone’, which connects school students and youth groups with mathematicians and their teachers during school closures.  This is based on the ‘I’m a Scientist’ platform and involves 40 minute live text-based chat sessions where the students can ask the mathematicians anything they like.  This can be anything from how they use maths in their area of work to what subjects they enjoyed most when at school.  Sarah, having previously participated in the ‘I’m a Scientist: Medical Research Zone’, says that “these are such great platforms for school students to engage with researchers and I think that it is especially important to have activities like this at the moment! The students get to see mathematicians and scientists as normal, relatable people, as well as seeing how the maths they learn in school applies to the real world. I am always so impressed with the questions that I get asked!”

Both Heather and Sarah have completed a ‘My Skills My Life’ role model profile for the WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) campaign. The WISE ‘My Skills My Life’ campaign is a research-based approach that aims to challenge the perceptions of STEM careers by school age girls. This initiative uses an online quiz to determine the personality type of a young person and then shows the careers of STEM professionals with similar skills.

Heather tells us “I’ve also created a ‘Spotlight On’ profile about my work as an interdisciplinary researcher in plant sciences. The profile will be sent to schools so they can use it as guidance when discussing career options in the sciences. Each profile includes an activity that students may be able to undertake in a science class. Teachers have even expressed interest in using them for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Maths) projects, where students create pieces of fiction using the ‘Spotlight On’ profiles as inspiration for their writing.”

Assistant Professor Katie Severn even displays bright and interesting maths in her window with the hope of inspiring passers by (see pic above)!

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Do you like Taskmaster? If so then you’ll love this! We’ve caught up with Matt Tyler (our very own Alex Horne) to find out about his latest project URNmaster and how his MMath is going.

What is URNmaster?

Taskmaster is a TV show on Dave which consists of 5 comedians completing very vague challenges, it’s the kind of show where you want to get involved and do it yourself at home. I started having my own ideas of challenges that I would like to see on the show, so I thought I would put them together and create my very own taskmaster. I then started to think of who I wanted to take on the roles of the comedians from URN (University Radio Nottingham). The five participants we had were: Grace (from the Grace and Matt show), Fred, Radhan, Reece and Emma. Our version is a five part series which you can find on the NSTV Facebook page.

How did you orchestrate all of the challenges?

This was really hard! Although there were four challenges shown on our series, we had actually filmed 10 different ones. The first task we told them was fake and we asked them to describe themselves using just five words, then a few weeks later we asked them to list those words again and they’d get a point for every correct word. This didn’t make the cut. On our first day of filming we recorded four different challenges, the only one that we decided to use was the logo one. I also felt more nervous on video than I thought I would. One thing that I noticed in the initial recordings was they everyone was focusing on trying to be funny and it didn’t come across as natural. The more challenges we did the more everyone settled into it and it began to flow more.

I even ended up carrying around a toaster for the bread challenge!

So what are URN and NSTV?

Voted Best Station at the National Student Radio Awards in 8 of the past 9 years, broadcasting 24 hours a day. There are a variety of shows including Speech, After Dark, and Daytime; where I co-host a show called the Grace and Matt Show (every Friday 9am-11am). Everyone who dedicated their time are really great people who are full of passion and really keen on it.

NSTV has loads of video content (including URNmaster) and I’m the head of entertainment this year.

How do you balance all of this extra-curricular work with your course?

I’d definitely describe myself as a proactive learner, so I find that the best way for me to learn is to revisit material and actively use it in a problem. For me this means that I can balance everything reasonably well between all this extra work and my MMath.

How are you finding your MMath at the moment?

It’s very good thanks, and I find the module topics really interesting too. I’m really excited about my dissertation project. It’s all about modelling the stability of groups of people when dancing at a free-flowing social dynamic situation (which in human words means modelling what kind of groups are stable and stay together in a nightclub). So take a large group of people; if the nightclub is empty they’ll form a circle, as soon as it start getting busier everyone gets a bit crushed and you’ll find they split into smaller groups of say three or four people. If you’re with three people you’ll pretty much stay together all night. I believe it’s to do with the space in between you, because people see it and think “I can push you a bit because I have the space”.

I’ve written a bit of code that takes the shape of the club, the number of people and spreads them out, gets them all thinking about who they want to be with, group them up, and now I need to do the next step. Now I need to think about when people get bored of who they’re with, start splitting off and joining new groups, is there now space? My biggest challenge is now finding the research to back this all up.

To watch the episodes click on this links below:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Don’t forget to tune into the Grace and Matt Show too, every Friday from 9am-11am on https://urn1350.net/.

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Our MASS (Modelling and Analytics for a Sustainable Society) students take on different challenges throughout the year. Ahead of their energy challenge, some of our students went down to Peterborough to visit the North Level District Internal Drainage Board. It came about when MASS student Alistair Delboyer used his contacts at the Environment Agency, and from there they were able to organise a trip to the Internal Drainage Board plant.

There are drainage systems all over the country which stop us from flooding, the areas that are above sea level are able to use gravity, however those that aren’t, such as this one in Peterborough, have to use an alternative method to physically pump the water away.

MASS students Alistair, Jack and Omomayowa stood by one of the pumps

The challenge that our students had been set was to model a small section of their drainage board, as Heather Collis explains:

“They gave us some data to analyse and we also built a model. On the day we went to the drainage board we were shown around the plant so that we could see the small section that we would be modelling so that we could get an idea of how it works. We learnt that their pump works by pumping water from still drainage channels into the tidal River Nene. It was good to be able to look inside the pumping station!”

Overall, the students really enjoyed the trip and learnt a lot from it, as Omomayewa Akele highlights:

“This is the first challenge we’ve addressed this way so it was a new and very interesting approach. I enjoyed going to site, meeting with the engineers and discussing how our skills and experience could contribute to their work. Our discussion offered some insight into the entire drainage process and what is done to prevent flooding. After hearing this, I was excited to get involved. I enjoyed working on this challenge and I hope they find our analysis and results helpful.”

So the energy challenge has now passed so we caught up with Heather to find out how it went.

“Overall, we feel the challenge has gone successfully. It has been really rewarding to work with partners in industry. We feel we’ve been able to make a good start on some data analysis and simple modelling that we hope they will find useful in any future analysis they undertake.”

To find out more about our MASS students and about the programme, click here.

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We’ve been catching up with one of our PhD students and recent EPSRC Doctoral Prize winner Rowland Seymour. We’ve been talking about all things relating to his recent triumphs to his field of work.

What made you want to apply for the Doctoral Prize Fellowship?

I got involved with Theo’s assignment research priority area, they hosted a sandpit day where they had people from lots of other departments get involved and they brought along their own projects. I met someone there from the N/LAB in the business school, off the back of that we successfully applied for some funding for a three month project. We found out that three months is not very long in the world of grants and research, we only managed to scratch the surface. That’s when I applied for this Doctoral Prize, I thought this would be a really great opportunity to mix my PhD with the stuff I’ve been doing in N/lab, and get some more money and more time to this.

How did you find the application process?

I underestimated the amount of effort and time you need to put into this, but David Hawker was really helpful and I got support from so many people from the school. The sheer amount of stuff you need to think about was a shock, the mathematical content is the most important, but there’s impact and outreach to think about too.

What’s the link between you PhD and this upcoming project?

So my PhD is about bird flu and foot and mouth dieses, it wasn’t until I got involved in the research priority day that I learnt about maths for international development and the statistics for that, so this prize and fellowship is a way of pivoting to a new area. I think this will help me develop in my career, go onto bigger fellowship in the future and I’d love to use this opportunity to lead a research group in this area.

So what’s the research topic?

Mathematics or statistics for international development, specifically helping cities and developing countries. As they grow very quickly, there can be lots of problems with inequality, poverty and modern day slavery (which is something the human rights lab are interested in). For example, recently there’s been an outbreak in cholera in Tanzania, that’s caused a lot of problems for the area, so my work is trying to identify areas in cities where people need help and what kind of support they need. One of the problems that I’ve encountered is that there’s not much data around or available from the governments, either this isn’t collected or isn’t not very good quality or unreliable. So, we’re using lots of alternative data sets like bus maps and telephone communication data, and we’re using those kinds of things alongside survey from people who live in the cities themselves.

Is there anything you’re particularly excited for?

One thing I’m really excited about is one day workshop I’ll be organising, the aim is to bring people together from both inside and outside the university. I’ll also be taking part in the summer project scheme for the Undergrads here so I have got some money to help out with that. Some of the money will be used to go to Tanzania which will be really exciting as I’ve spent all this time researching these places, I’m looking forward to going and seeing them.

Was maths research something you’ve always considered doing as a profession?

I’ve always been interested in maths and research. My supervisor has been really good at pushing me to do more exciting things, putting myself out there and getting involved in more maths research and travel grants, attending conferences. I’m definitely looking forward to getting into international development, it’s different to what I’m used to and it’s interdisciplinary work. The thing with maths is you can write down definitions and define things really easily, everything is very strict and precise, whereas with international development it’s so vague. One of the best things about this is that I’ve got some money to get involved with NGOs and some charities, so I can invite them to the workshop I’m organising and see my work get translated into a policy.

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The eggs were accompanied by messages of support and positivity

This Easter, one of our students Katie Severn decided to create an egg hunt promoting mental health awareness.

What was it?

Hidden all around the department were small chocolate eggs each with a fact or information about mental health.

A lot of the eggs provided useful information such as links to websites with advice (HealthyU), apps that aim to help tackle stress and anxiety (Youper) and general ways to help with wellbeing (exercise).

Over 200 facts were written and eggs hidden- plenty for the whole department! I’ve got to admit my hand ached by the end of writing them.

Why do it?

As the PhD mental health Ambassador I felt like this was a great way to get the whole department to engage with mental health.  By running events like these I hope that the stigma surrounding mental health will continue to decrease and people will become comfortable talking to others about mental health. Also with the added incentive of chocolate it was an opportunity for everyone to learn about mental health and realise it’s importance, and maybe even signpost ways to increase their own wellbeing.

How was it?

I was really pleased with the engagement for the event, I had UG, PhD, post docs, lecturers and admin staff all talk to me and join in. I know some people were so egg-cited they spent sessions looking for eggs around the whole department!

People said some of the facts shocked them especially the prevalence ( 1 in 4 people in the UK will be affected by mental health problems at some point in their lifetime), and others said they would look into the support signposted. Because of the success of this I’m really looking forward to planning another mental health event in future.

The hardest egg hidden?

.. well I can’t say because it’s still not been found!

Eggs were hidden all across Mathematical Sciences

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