Adams Lecture Award last week at Fab Tech 2017. Suresh Babu, UT–Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair for Advanced Manufacturing, received the 2017 Comfort A. The work was honored with the top award in topical reporting in the small newsroom category in a contest sponsored by the Online News Association Conference, the world’s largest association of digital journalists. WUOT, the public radio station licensed to UT, has received its first international award, for its TruckBeat project. Selected from more than 100 organizations, UT was honored for its efforts to incorporate effective and inventive stormwater management strategies into every construction project on campus. UT’s Stormwater Management Office has been recognized as Organization of the Year by the Tennessee Stormwater Association. Mission Awards recognize SWE groups that embody the organization’s core values and demonstrate continuous improvement and growth toward strategic goals. The UT chapter of the Society of Women Engineers was awarded the SWE Mission Award Silver. Already named the top consumer of green power in academia, UT is the only school in the Southeast to win the award. The campus has received a Green Power Leadership Award from the US Environmental Protection Agency. Join the higher education network for more comment, analysis and job opportunities, direct to your inbox.Here are some of the faculty, staff, and students honored by outside organizations in recent months: He teaches and researches at Utrecht University, the Netherlands Julian Kirchherr is the author of the book The Lean PhD: Radically Improve the Efficiency, Quality and Impact of Your Research’. ![]() Reminding ourselves of this may help to fix the broken PhD machine. Confucius said one of the core principles of the academy should be as follows: “The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it”. We need to move away from a self-referential culture in which academics talk only to their peers. It’s time to disrupt the current PhD system to make it better for early-career researchers. ![]() They would finish their PhD when they have made a difference in the real world. Instead of labouring over every sentence of a 100,000-word dissertation locked away in an office, PhD students would share a concise 2,000-word draft with those practitioners to collect targeted feedback. Students would then co-create the content of their theses with their supervisor as well as practitioners in their field of research. This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to practitioners from day one of their research, rather than spending the first year (or more) reading obscure academic literature. I want us to reimagine a PhD that is designed not to win kudos within the academic community, but rather aimed at discovering something new that will be useful for practitioners and have real social impact. I wish the academy would incentivise scholars to improve society, not chase citations. Academics love definitions, not solutions. But I’m not celebrating: this paper symbolises everything that’s broken in the academy. People I’ve never met before come up to me at conferences to congratulate me. ![]() It is in the top 3% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric, a tool measuring a paper’s influence among academics on social media. In academic terms, this paper is a hit: it’s been cited 39 times since its publication. It can often feel like contemporary academia is about chasing citations rather than changing the world As a result, I have now published a paper in which I reviewed 114 definitions of a current academic buzzword, circular economy, to propose the 115th definition of this term. I read in the promotions guidelines at my university that if I want to be promoted from assistant to associate professor I need to accumulate significant citations. My core paper on this topic has been cited three times so far. I research how to mitigate the social impact of hydropower dams. Most academic work is shared only with a particular scientific community, rather than policymakers or businesses, which makes it entirely disconnected from practice. Yet it can often feel like contemporary academia is more about chasing citations. Many academics enter science to change the world for the better. One study found that for every 200 people who complete a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post and only one will become a professor. In any case, most are unlikely to be able to continue. Although 80% of science students start their PhD with the intention to pursue a career in science, theirenthusiasm typically wanes to the point that just 55% plan to continue in academia when nearing graduation.
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