Sanctuary Seekers STEM Seminar: Career and Professional Development

Friday 23 February

Introduction

Following a series of successful online Maths sessions, we are delighted to welcome you to our first in-person STEM seminar for Sanctuary Seekers. The seminar is led by Professors Ian Griffiths and Samuel Cohen from the Mathematical Institute and Dr David Levy from Politics, complemented by several guest speakers. Our sessions are mainly focused on career and professional development issues with plenty of time for group discussion. We also hope to offer some brief parallel sessions on more specialist areas of maths, and have designed the schedule to provide space in the breaks for informal exchanges.

Venue and travel

• The venue of the workshop was Mansfield College. The workshop took place in the Old Hall of Mansfield College.

Schedule

• 9:30-10:00: Arrival and registration. Teas and coffees available
• 10:00-10:20: Introductions, seminar goals and hopes for the day
• 10:20-11:00: Session 1 - Academic and industry jobs for STEM researchers

• 11:15-12:00: Session 2, part 1 - CV Workshop with Niamh Walsh from Oxford University Careers Office. Chair: Sam Cohen
• 12:00-12:30: Session 2, part 2 - CV Clinic (opportunity for 1:1 slots) with Niamh Walsh and Suzi Black from Oxford University Careers Office. Please bring a printed copy of your brief CV (1-2 pages max) or have it visible on a laptop. Chair: Sam Cohen

• 13:30-14:30: Session 3 - Research talks:
  • Dr Nick Gill, Open University. Working in Academia and Industry.
    Abstract
    I will briefly describe my current experience working part-time in academia and part-time in industry. I will give a very short account of my research interests in pure maths (finite group theory) and then discuss my surprising (to me) discovery that my pure maths skills were transferrable and applicable in a real world setting. My non-academic work concerns the random selection of participants in citizens' assemblies and I will give a brief account of this.
  • Dr Timothy La Rock, University of Oxford, Representing Higher-order Phenomena in Network Science.
    Abstract
    Over the last thirty years, Network Science has developed into a common framework for addressing problems across a diverse set of fields built upon the mathematics, statistics, and physics of graphs. Many complex phenomena are naturally represented by networks, however in recent years it has been acknowledged that more complex representations may be useful in some circumstances. In this short talk I will briefly introduce two of the most typical classes of explicit higher-order models in Network Science. First, I will discuss work using DeBruijn graphs to represent observed walks, which model higher-order (non-Markovian) memory in the traversal of networks. Then, I will introduce the use of hypergraphs for modelling higher-order group interactions, which generalise pairwise interaction networks to interactions of arbitrary sizes. Finally, I will discuss the connections between the two notions of higher-order phenomena and some current directions in the field.

• 15:00-15:40: Session 4 - Open Q&A with panel
• 15:40-16:00: Conclusions and closing remarks
• 16:00: End

Sponsors

We express our heartfelt gratitude to our sponsors for their generous support in making this event possible.

• The Mathematical Institute
• Mansfield College
• Jan Saxl Fund
• The Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara)
• Isaac Newton Institute