On Friday 11 November, Kent hosted a special conference at its Canterbury campus to mark the end of the first full year of the Eastern Academic Research Consortium (EARC).
Proposed in 2014, EARC was created to strengthen current collaboration and develop new cross-disciplinary research between its three member universities: East Anglia, Essex and Kent.
Each partner in the Consortium acts as lead in one of three areas:
- Digital Humanities, led by the University of Kent
- Quantitative Social Science, led by the University of Essex
- Synthetic Biology, led by the University of East Anglia (UEA)
Kent’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow, welcomed EARC colleagues to the conference and gave the welcome address.
Guests included: the Vice Chancellor of the University of Essex, Professor Anthony Forster and the Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, Professor David Richardson, and Professor Philippe De Wilde, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Innovation, University of Kent.
Leading academics in each area updated their colleagues about the joint progress made in the first year, and their ambitions for the future.
Notable EARC achievements in the last 12 months include the University of Essex’s Dr Federica Genovese’s publication on European monetary policy and social unrest, which received significant media coverage, and UEA’s Dr Chidiebere Ogbonnaya work on how actions such as wage and employment freezes taken to combat recessions may compromise workers’ well-being and organisational performance.
Eastern ARC Synthetic Biology Fellow Bern Miller was awarded the Gen9 Prize for Synthetic Biology, in July 2016. Kent’s Dr Benjamin Vis has also been successful in securing Research Council funding to bring together an international network of academics interested in exploring approaches to sustainable urban planning: the TruLife network.
The Consortium will meet three times over the following 2 years, concluding with a public exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich in 2018.