I currently work in an empty void. Not the usual emotional one but rather an actual physical one. With my move to Ireland just next week, everything in my office has been packed up and sent across the waters. And so now my workspace is empty and echoey. It’s also very white. It’s like I’ve …
It’s been a funny old month. With only a few weeks left at Teesside before I leave and start my exciting new job at Maynooth University, it quickly became time to start thinking about how I was going to shift my research over to Ireland. The thing about being in one place for so long, …
This post contains discussion of the challenges in midwifery and childbirth If you’ve been watching/reading/listening/imbibing the news over the past few years, you will have heard repeated claims of the crisis in midwifery. Not in terms of student recruitment (which remains strong), but in terms of clinical care. There have been a series of high-profile …
Read more “Call the Midwife! But, like, be really nice to them because it’s a really hard job…”
We’ve pivoted. We’ve shifted. We’ve migrated. Take your pick – but whichever one you go for, university academic staff have moved our face-to-face teaching online to allow us to support our students during our various COVID lock-downs. But now a number of friends and colleagues who work at other universities have been told to start …
Well, it’s official. Tim Thompson has left the building. And entered another one. 100 metres away. On the same campus. This seemed more dramatic when I started… As some of you may know, the School of Science, Engineering and Design is no more. We’ve had a bit of a restructure here at Teesside, and the …
Sometimes, just sometimes, I agree to do something before I’ve fully thought through how I can actually do it. And sometimes, just sometimes, innocent people get caught up in all of this. Now, I either do this because I have a pathological fear of saying ‘No’, or because I have unfaltering confidence in the abilities …
This weekend I was able to head over to the Riverside to watch Boro play QPR. It’s the first time I’ve seen them play as well as they did – looking (mostly) in control and putting together some really nice passing – Barca on the Tees… It’s not the first time I’ve been to the …
So, I almost knocked over both Emily Thornberry and Floella Benjamin in one day… Forensic science is in a challenging place at the moment. The well-publicised closure of the national Forensic Science Service and the rapid marketisation of forensic provision has left the sector a little winded. Combined with the complexity of contracting out forensic …
Read more “House of Lords Science & Technology Committee – Inquiry into Forensic Science”
I’ve been looking forward to getting back into the classroom again. For all the peace and quiet of the summer period, there’s nothing like the hustle and bustle of the first few weeks of a new academic year to get you excited for the possibilities ahead. So I was very pleased to see that I’d …
Everyone here knows that I like to play video games. I always have, and my transition from ugly duckling to beautiful swan can be mapped alongside my gaming platforms: Spectrum 48k and Spectrum 128k at school, Amiga and Atari Lynx II (if anyone remembers that…) at college, PlayStation 1 and PS2 at university, PlayStation 3 …