Lancaster University

This is archived news from Lancaster University. You can find up-to-date stories in our current news section.

LANCASTER TO RECEIVE 4.5M FOR POSTGRAD STATISTICS TEACHING

01/07/2005 10:29:44

Lancaster University has been awarded £4.5 million from the Higher Education Funding Council for England for a national Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Postgraduate Statistics.

£ 2 million will be spent on a state of the art teaching building and the centre will be funded with 500k a year for 5 years. Statistics research at Lancaster is internationally recognised and received the highest rating in the Research Assessment Exercise of 6*.

Lancaster’s statistics research impacts on many areas. Recent projects include: looking for the causes of childhood diabetes, mapping disease in developing countries; modelling extreme sea waves; analysing the pattern of foot and mouth cases in the 2001 epidemic; modelling badger disease transmission, analysing criminal careers and serious offending.

Lancaster’s centre is part of HEFCE’s £300 million programme of national Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs).

Lancaster’s Centre will provide

* Postgraduate Courses for Statistics students ( including Environmental Statistics, Medical Statistics, and Applied Social Statistics)

* Short courses for Postgraduates in the Life Sciences, Social Sciences, medicine and Veterinary Science

* Quantitative training courses for PhD Students

* Continuing Professional Development courses in statistics for professionals

Professor Amanda Chetwynd, director of the Centre for Excellence at Lancaster said:

” We are delighted to have the postgraduate training provided by the Lancaster Statistics group recognised. The group already has a reputation for world class statistical research working with a range of professionals for example medics, vets, biologists and criminologists and CETL funding will allow us to develop a substantial training programme to complement this”.

74 Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) hosted by 53 institutions have been created to promote excellence in teaching and learning across all subjects and aspects of teaching and learning in higher education.

A complete list of CETLs and brief descriptions are given on the HEFCE web-site (www.hefce.ac.uk http://www.hefce.ac.uk> under Learning and teaching).