TEF silver 2023 logo

Brighton secures national Silver Award for teaching excellence

The University of Brighton has been recognised for the quality of its teaching and student outcomes in a UK-wide evaluation of higher education institutions.

The university has today secured a Silver award in the national Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The award confirms that the student experience and student outcomes across all of the university’s undergraduate provision including apprenticeships are “typically very high quality”, delivering excellence above the rigorous standards set for the UK’s higher education providers. The rating lasts for four years, until September 2027.

The TEF is a national scheme run by the Office for Students (OfS). It aims to encourage universities to improve and deliver excellence in the areas that students care about the most: teaching, learning and achieving positive outcomes from their studies.

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RTPI awards for research excellence logo

Graduate finalist in prestigious town planning awards

Congratulations to Town Planning graduate Laura Hemsley for reaching the finals of the prestigious Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) Awards for Research Excellence (Student Award).

Now in their ninth year, the awards continue to recognise and promote high quality, impactful spatial planning research. Laura was nominated for her masters dissertation, ‘The Effectiveness of Strategic Planning Arrangements in Mineral Planning’.

We caught up with her to find out more about her dissertation, the support from her lecturers and what it meant to be nominated for the award.

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Debris on mountain road cropped Source: @theaftertimes on Twitter

Brighton Geography and the 2023 Morocco Earthquake

Please note that some people may find the information and images below distressing.

Every Spring we bring the human geography students on our 2nd year BA(Hons) Geography programme to Morocco, to practice their fieldwork skills. Since 2011 we’ve visited important sites in the city of Marrakech, and built a close working relationship with the community of Imlil village in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, including meeting local residents and their families. When in the area, our students study the challenges of living in this mountainous environment.

Unfortunately a rare but devastating example of such challenges occurred on Friday Sept 8th 2023, in the form of a terrible earthquake that had its epicentre close to Imlil. We know that our former and current students will want to know about how the area has dealt with the impact. So over the past few days we’ve been checking that our community partners are safe, the extent of the damage, and – most importantly of all – what we can do to support Imlil’s people.

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Calebtina holding her award and smiling at the Students Union Awards

Gaining confidence and achieving goals at Brighton

Third-year Pharmacy student Calebtina Peprah received a scholarship through the Student Potential Fund. She has shared with us the positive impact this had made on her studies and her appreciation to the donors for their support.

I am the first person in my family to go to university and was determined to make a bold step and attend university. I have always wanted to pursue a career in healthcare, and I could not hide my joy when I got accepted at the University of Brighton. It was a dream come true.  

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Worthing Crematorium garden with trees and the building with blue sky

Brighton researchers helping create world’s first hydrogen-powered crematorium

A project to create the world’s first hydrogen-powered crematorium is being supported by a team of researchers from the University of Brighton.

The pioneering project, funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, is centred on Worthing Crematorium in West Sussex and is part of Adur & Worthing Council’s plan to become carbon neutral by 2030.

This summer, cremator manufacturer DFW Europe will begin testing pioneering hydrogen technology at its base in the Netherlands. If these tests are successful, the technology will be brought over to trial at Worthing Crematorium as early as spring 2024.

Dr Kevin Wyche, Pete Lyons and Dr Kirsty Smallbone from the University of Brighton’s School of Applied Sciences are carrying out air quality monitoring on the project to demonstrate that the proposed new hydrogen-powered system can dramatically reduce carbon emissions without worsening air quality.

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What is it like studying a pharmacy degree?

Hi, I’m Eva and I’m a third year Pharmacy MPharm student. Here is my experience of studying at University of Brighton – from lectures and work experience to getting support, my favourite places, social life, living in Brighton, and tips on making and saving money.

How I found university different from college

I struggled with the jump from GCSE to A-level at college and got really stressed that the only form of assessment was one set of exams. Uni isn’t like that; there are multiple forms of assessment including exams, coursework, and OSCEs (live spoken exams, role play style), assessed at different points throughout the year. This takes some of the pressure off the end-of-year exams and gives me a better idea of how I’m doing academically throughout the year.

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Discussing solutions to current challenges at the Planning for Water conference

It’s not often these days that you hear people say ‘money is not the problem’, but that was one of the more surprising contributions at a recent Planning for Water  conference hosted by the Centre for Aquatic Environments and the Royal Town Planning Institute SE region at the University.

The 19th June conference brought together almost 70 town planners, engineers, developers, academics, charities, water companies and government officials to discuss solutions to some of the current challenges that water quality, water scarcity, climate change and the biodiversity crisis present to the building sector.

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Brighton’s unique perspective

Abeer Aamir, third year Pharmacy MPharm student, tells us more about her experience so far of studying here.

You can read about how Abeer won the this year’s David Kearney Award from the British Pharmaceutical Students’ Association (BPSA) here.

What made you choose Brighton and your course?

I’ll start with the course part first. Pharmacy has always kind of been at the forefront of my career focus, and that is entirely because of my parents. They’ve had the biggest influence even before I was born.

My dad worked in the pharmaceutical sales industry specialising in dermatology. So literally my entire childhood was me helping him study his materials and things like that, or listening to his presentations that he would be giving to doctors and pharmacists. So that exposed me to the whole world of clinical medicine for the first time.

And then on the other side my mother worked in a hospital – as a medical lab technologist, I believe. But she studied as a microbiologist, so she also helped cultivate that interest and that love for science. I remember on one of my birthdays, she got out an old microscope and she had all her old pathology slides to show me and stuff like that.

So, they’ve always fostered that love for healthcare and the sciences and trying to find the clinical aspect of everything. And then when I was in high school, I decided to just dip my toe into pharmacy, to see if I liked it or not. I volunteered at a pharmacy near me, at a major chain back in Canada [Abeer is from Toronto]. And they loved me enough that they hired me! So, I ended up working there for three years.

So, it’s safe to say that I absolutely adored the profession as well. So that just deepened my love for pharmacy.

And the one thing that I noticed when I was there was that I always wanted to make patients the forefront of what I was doing and how I was learning. So, Brighton ended up being my choice to study because it offers such a unique perspective in the way that the course is delivered.

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Abeer Aamir

Brighton pharmacy student wins prestigious national award

Thanks to her exceptional work in advancing equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) at the University of Brighton, Pharmacy MPharm student Abeer Aamir has won this year’s David Kearney Award from the British Pharmaceutical Students’ Association (BPSA).

Abeer, who has just finished her third year, described herself as “incredibly grateful and humbled” to receive the prestigious national award, which recognises outstanding contribution to pharmacy over the past 12 months. 

The nomination calls Abeer’s commitment to promoting inclusivity and diversity within the pharmacy profession “a testament to her dedication to advancing the field, keeping patients safe, and making it more equitable and accessible for all individuals”.

“As a first-generation immigrant and a pharmacy student, I’ve seen both sides of the coin,” Abeer said. “I’ve seen the ways in which medical racism penetrates the healthcare profession, and it really does disproportionately affect people of colour and women. So, using all that lived experience, I really hope to shine a light on unconscious bias and unconscious medical racism, so that the curriculum is a lot more reflective of the population that our graduates are serving.”

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Bhavik in the lab wearing a white lab coat with colours writing and drawing

University of Brighton scientist wins prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry Prize

Professor Bhavik Patel has won the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Analytical Science mid-career Prize in recognition of brilliance in research and innovation.

Based at the University of Brighton’s School of Applied Sciences, the Professor of Clinical and Bioanalytical Chemistry has been named winner of the prize for the development of innovative electrochemical sensors for advancing the understanding of biological signalling processes. This year’s winners join a prestigious list of past winners in the RSC’s prize portfolio, 60 of whom have gone on to win Nobel Prizes for their work, including 2022 Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi and 2019 Nobel laureate John B Goodenough.

After receiving the prize, Professor Patel said: “This prize is real recognition for me and my group on our research approach to create sensors which are fit-for-purpose and provide impactful knowledge about biological systems.”

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