NTDC Technician Development Fund winners announced

In August 2021, the NTDC launched two call-outs for technicians to access funding opportunities. We are delighted to announce the winners below!

Choosing the winners of the NTDC Technician Development Fund was incredibly difficult this year. We received many brilliant, thoughtful and inspiring ideas that blew us away. Thank you to all who applied!

This year, we opened two funding opportunities.

1. Technicians using digital technology in the post-Covid world

Covid-19 has changed the way technicians work. It has transformed how teaching and research within our universities and research institutions have been delivered. For this funding opportunity, we were looking for a technician or group of technical staff to design and develop an initiative that supports the area of digital technology.

In particular, we were judging entries based on:

• Transferability across the technical sector.

• Impact on student teaching and or research.

• Impact on technical staff.

• Impact on the university/research institute.

And the winner is…

A huge congratulations to Tosin Famakinwa from Western Sydney! Tosin is a Cluster Manager and his idea involves developing a visual dashboard for technical equipment monitoring that can be accessed remotely in order to check equipment maintenance requirements and usages.

We will be interviewing Tosin for a future blog, so watch this space!

2. Promoting technical careers to the next generation

For this fund, we were looking for a technician or group of technical staff to design and develop an outreach/public engagement activity, which supports the promotion of technical careers to the next generation, with a particular emphasis on recruiting individuals from BAME backgrounds to technical careers.

In particular, we judged the entries on:

• Transferability across disciplines.

• Adaption of the delivery model to suit a wide range of audiences (children aged 6-16 years and their families).

• Cost effectiveness of resources required and their availability.

• Ability to reach a large audience.

• Potential impact of the project.

And the winners are…

For this fund, we were able to select TWO winners…

Congratulations to Karen Bailey-Smith, Technical Development Manager at Sheffield Hallam and Russell Wilson, Labratory Technician at Edinburgh Napier.

We look forward to hearing about their projects more in the new year!

Thanks again

Thanks to all our entrants for their time and hard work. We will announce our next funding round soon. In the meantime, another huge congratulation to our three successful applicants!