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Committee Pledges
The EDI Committee is currently committed to the following race pledges:
Develop a new mentoring scheme – the mentoring scheme will be for Early Career Researchers and we aim to open this up to PhD students to encourage them to stay on in academia and help bridge any BAME Attainment Gap. Training will be provided to both mentors and mentees. Evidence for where mentoring has been successful is in the advancement of women academics in the department who have received active mentoring from senior colleagues (both male and female). Hence, our aim is to expand this success in all areas of diversity to our early career researchers and PhD students.
Continue to review student recruitment practices to encourage inclusivity and increase diversity across our student body. This will include ensuring that outreach and engagement activities are reaching underrepresented groups. With the increased use of remote activities, our aim would be to expand outreach activities to underrepresented groups in urban areas such as Bradford and Manchester. We would also look to potentially develop some summer internships after the successful teaching and remote internships this summer.
The recruitment process for staff positions. Previously, we proactively targeted female researchers in an effort to expand the numbers of women applying for academic positions, which was successful (7 out of 10 recent lecturer appointments in chemistry were female). We will attempt to proactively target BAME researchers in future positions and we will look to trial the use of a Fair Recruitment Specialist in one appointment round.
Expand the EDI committee with a targeted role. The Culture working group of the committee has an LGBTQ+ Champion and a Wellbeing Champion we will aim to expand this to also have a BAME Champion. The LGBTQ+ Champion enabled an active network to be developed in the department so we would work with the BAME Champion to develop a similar network for this underrepresented group.
- EDI Committee Members
Ioanna Manolopoulou
Ioanna joined the Department of Statistical Science in 2012 and is currently Associate Professor. She moved to UCL from Duke, North Carolina, where she spent a few years as Postdoctoral Associate and Visiting Assistant Professor. Prior to that, she completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She is originally from Athens, Greece. She really enjoys exploring the outdoors with her two young sons
Gianluca Baio
Gianluca joined the department in 2005 as a post-doc after completing a PhD at the University of Florence (in his home country, Italy) and spending a visiting period at MIT. His research interests are in Bayesian statistical modelling, specifically for cost-effectiveness analysis and decision-making problems in the health systems, but likes to apply statistical modelling to basically everything, including football and the Eurovision song contest. He spends most of his time trying (and failing) to tame his two children. He's been the most successful football coach throughout his son's career (unbeaten in two years), hoping to improve the record work his daughter's team.
Owen Nicholas
Owen has been a member of Statistical Science since 2018. His main concerns are care for carers, and ageism.
Chak Hei (Hugo) Lo
Hugo joined the Department in 2021 and is currently a Lecturer (Teaching). Previously he worked in University of Edinburgh as a University Teacher and Durham University as a Teaching Fellow. His research is in probability theory and its applications. His interests include asymptotic behaviour of near critical system and random graph dynamics inspired by physics or other applications. One of his important focus in EDI is to understand how cultural differences and learning backgrounds of international students affect their studies in UCL and to develop ways to help these students. He enjoys playing boardgames and badminton.
