The BEAR Champion team continues to expand its reach across the University, with ten new BEAR Champions joining the voluntary team in 2025. Our BEAR Champions 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. We currently have 24 BEAR Champions spread over all 5 colleges – see our list of BEAR Champions. In 2025, we welcomed the following BEAR Champions: Dr Christopher Shave from the Institute of Translational Medicine, Dr Alex Squires from Chemistry, Boutheina Nedjai from Mathematics, Haiming Zhou from Finance, Mingjie Zhang from Modern Languages, Hibah Saddal from Metallurgy and Materials, Darío González from Cancer and Genomic Sciences, Shaun Swain from Physics & Astronomy, Dr Xiuxiu Han from Chemical Engineering, and Dr Shashwat Sharma from Engineering.
Whilst the group meets regularly in hybrid format, 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 2025. Simon Atack and Dominic Wilson from the Architecture, Infrastructure and Systems Group in Advanced Research Computing led us on the tour, taking us to see the BlueBEAR supercomputer. See our data centre blog posts for some more inside pictures and information.
Over the last year our BEAR Champions have helped us by delivering case study talks for the University’s Data Conference, Computer Science, College of Medicine and Health, and given talks on their careers and research for the BEAR Challenge. They have supported researchers in their area to use our supercomputer BlueBEAR, provided feedback on services, helped us on stalls at University events, delivered Carpentries training workshops and the 2025 BEAR Conference, spread the word about secure storage, and many more things! In return, they are often the first to hear about job, funding and training opportunities, they 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.