The BEAR Champion scheme recently reached its fifth anniversary! Over that time, we have had 33 BEAR Champions join the team and help us spread the word at the University of Birmingham about all the BEAR (Birmingham Environment for Academic Research) services that are available to support their research. As we enter 2025, we currently have 20 BEAR Champions spread over all 5 colleges – see our list of BEAR Champions. In 2024, we welcomed 5 new BEAR Champions: Dr Vincenzo Brachetta from Metallurgy and Materials, Dr Lei Zhang from Psychology, Dr Chandan Bose from Metallurgy and Materials, Rosalind Ellis from Psychology, and Sebastian Gilbert from the College of Medicine and Health.
Whilst the group meets regularly online, we held an in-person lunch/social back in September for BEAR Champions as well as our trainers, followed by a data centre tour for BEAR Champions who joined the team in 2024. Jon Hunt and Dominic Wilson from the Architecture, Infrastructure and Systems Group in Advanced Research Computing led us on the tour, taking us to see the newly doubled in size BlueBEAR. See our data centre blog posts for some more inside pictures and information.
Over the last year, our BEAR Champions have helped us by getting us talk slots at school PhD inductions, delivering sessions on BEAR, set up user groups (for OpenFOAM and Julia), supported users in their area with using our supercomputer BlueBEAR, provided feedback on services, helped us on stalls at University events, delivered Carpentries training workshops, are running the BEAR 2025 Conference, and many more things! In return, they are often the first to hear about job opportunities in the team and new services, get priority help with using BEAR services, and are able to network as part of a team of early career researchers, whilst gaining transferable skills. One of our former BEAR Champions (Warrick Ball) is now a Senior Research Software Engineer in the Advanced Research Computing team.
Inevitably when dealing with research staff and research students, there is a high turnover due to the short-term nature of research funding, and we have said farewell to several BEAR Champions this year. In addition, there are many schools/institutes that are not currently represented by a BEAR Champion. We are therefore always looking for new BEAR Champions who can help spread the word in their area – have a read of our ‘Join the BEAR Champion team‘ blog post and fill in the application form if you are interested, or contact us at bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk for more information.
