Welcome to the first newsletter of 2014. I would like to open the year with congratulations to a number of staff. Firstly, Emma Stone has been appointed as the University’s Assistant Director of Human Resources. Personally I have to admit to rather mixed feelings – simply because I will really miss her at the Clinical School. Emma has been superb as the School’s HR Business Manager, and she and Robin Uttin were a highly effective duo as joint interim Secretaries of the School before Caroline Edmonds took up the definitive appointment.  I am quite sure that the University could not have made a better appointment, and it is really good to see one of our key staff move up to such an important role.

Secondly, congratulations to David Neal and Juliet Compston for their recognition by the Queen in the New Year Honours list (more of this below).

Thirdly, many congratulations to those who received awards under the University’s UAS employee recognition scheme – both the team who did so much work on the MRC and CRUK transfers last year, and Vivien Hodges, (Equality and Diversity) who received an award for her work on Athena SWAN. 

On a rather different note, I would like to draw the attention of anyone using animal models to an important report which was published last month http://brownreport.info/.

Finally, I was delighted to hear from the MRC that they have awarded us £600,000 for a further year of the Confidence in Concept scheme following the application that I led in the autumn; this will be administered by Dr Jana Voigt in the School’s recently established Office for Translational Research and details of how to apply for funding will be circulated in due course.

Patrick H Maxwell 
Regius Professor of Physic & Head of the School of Clinical Medicine