THE THATCHER DEVELOPMENT AWARDS

The Thatcher Development Awards offer grants of up to £2000 to enable Somerville students to pursue an innovative project with wider social benefits and that facilitates personal growth.

The funding the Awards provide can support innovation, such as in the case of Alfie Brazier (2020, MCompSci Computer Science) and his internship with the Institute for Marine and Antartctic Studies (IMAS) at the University of Tasmania.

Alfie brought vital technical expertise to their sea ice record reconstruction project. Antarctic sea ice is a critical measure of the climate crisis, but complete records only date back to the invention of satellite measuring systems in 1979. It is still possible to extract chemical data from ice-cap cores for the years before this and use it as the basis of a reconstructed sea ice record, but there is a major hurdle: decadal shifts in wind patterns that drag snow over sea ice and then deposit it at the ice core site significantly increase the challenges in creating a reliable result.

What started as a physical sciences challenge had entered the realm of computer science: cue Alfie. Working under Dr Will Hobbs, Alfie helped to create a new model using a non-linear, random forest approach to combining historic proxies rather than the linear regression method the team had used so far.

The results were startling. Alfie’s finished model outputted significantly better results than anything in the current literature, representing a step change in the field of sea ice prediction and creating a new academic resource. His work will be published in the next year, and has also earned him an invitation to return to IMAS for a PhD or Research Masters in January 2024.

Misbah Reshi (2021, MSt Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies) used her Development Award to scale up a pioneering virtual mentoring scheme for some of the world’s most disadvantaged students. Project EduAccess seeks to democratise access to higher education and further inclusivity in universities by providing mentorship, guidance workshops and fee waiver support to learners in marginalised communities in South Asia.

With the extra funds, Misbah collaborated with the Centre for Career Planning and Counselling (CCPC) to hold three days of workshops at the University of Kashmir focused on providing the right knowledge and skills for applying to university. They invited speakers from across India who had studied around the world to conduct sessions covering the Social Sciences, STEM, and the Humanities. The event generated huge interest locally: over 900 students registered to attend across the three days. The in-person breakout sessions and their opportunities for targeted CV assistance proved to be especially popular.

“It was much bigger than I had anticipated or planned when I made an application for the Thatcher Development Award,” said Misbah. “Not only local Kashmiri students, we also had some students flying in from Jharkhand, Gujarat to attend the workshop.”

“In a place like Kashmir, marred with regular curfews and constant shutdowns, it is even more important for universities to create opportunities when there is a lack thereof.”

Misbah and her colleague’s efforts will continue to be available to aspiring university applicants through the Project EduAccess website, where the information was consolidated and transformed into a series of guides by a professional designer. She also presented her project in Somerville at our showcase of development awards and internships in Hilary Term 2023 to inspire students considering projects of their own.