University staff on New Year Honours list
02 Jan 2014
Colleagues start 2014 with tribute from the Queen
The Queen’s New Year Honours list has included some of our University colleagues.
Lenox Green, a postgraduate office administrator at the School of Maths, has been awarded an OBE for his voluntary work to help youngsters, families and homeless people in Manchester.
Twenty years ago, Lenox and wife Heather re-mortgaged their home to set up the Rainbow Christian Centre in Hulme, having spent many years helping homeless people in Manchester – even bringing them into their own home while they dealt with drug, alcohol and other issues.
As the couple worked to refit the centre, local children came to see what we were doing and asked Lenox and Heather to do something for them so they started opening two evenings a week. Soon more than 20 children were turning up regularly.
The centre is now open four days a week and offers a range of activities, support and inspiration for the local community; helping families with housing, benefits, education, apprenticeships, prison visiting, court appearances, family liaison and debt, providing a weekly food bank, responding to the needs of people in a flexible way and helping them to help themselves.
Over 600 children and young people have been through the doors. Many of the original children are grown up and still visit, or volunteer themselves or bring their children.
The kids’ testimonies say it all. Danni: “He would do anything for us and has worked so hard to make the centre what we want it to be.” Antony: “He is a father figure and the kids respect him because he is genuine.” And James: “To tell the truth, before the centre was opened I was a pretty bad kid – getting arrested, going to jail – but then things changed. I dropped the bad stuff and as I got older I started helping out with the kids.”
Professor Carole Anne Goble, at the School of Computer Science, has been made a CBE for her services to Science.
Carole is a leading authority on the Semantic Web, also known as Linked Data - a means of enriching the Web with knowledge.
She has worked on the computational and technical underpinning of scientific disciplines, particularly Life Sciences, Systems Biology and Biodiversity, and has had an impact on bioinformatics, e-Science, open science and applied computer science.
This was reflected in her recent appointment to the Council of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) by the Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts.
She researches the acceleration of scientific innovation through a variety of means including social, virtual environments and new models of scholarship for data-intensive science and since 2001 she has also directed a large team specialising in e-Science.
As an applied computer scientist, she has always worked alongside other disciplines such as bioinformatics, particularly Systems Biology, and is responsible for many widely-used open source e-Science software.
She is also leading activities in European e-Infrastructure for Life Sciences, has served on advisory and funding boards for ERC, STFC, BBSRC, EPSRC, Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering, as well as numerous oversight committees including the Dutch National Bioinformatics Centre, the EU Enabling Grids for E-Science, NERC Environmental Virtual Observatory and the Software Carpentry Advisory Board.
In 2008 she was awarded the Microsoft Jim Gray e-Science award for contributions to e-Science. In 2012 she was a nominated finalist for the Benjamin Franklin award for contributions to Open Access in Life Science.
Professor Douglas Kell, at the School of Chemistry and the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, has been awarded a CBE for his services to science and research.
Douglas is a leading figure in the field of systems biology, the multidisciplinary approach to tackling complex biological problems using theory, computer modelling and experimentation. It is revolutionising how bioscientists think and work and will make the outputs of their work both more useful, and easier to use, in industry and policymaking.
He was an early pioneer in the development of systems to generate and handle the huge amounts of data that followed the emergence of the ‘omic’ sciences – such as genomics, proteomics and metabolomics. His work has enabled researchers to harness the power of these approaches by giving them the tools to interpret and analyse the data generated by modern biology.
A Professor of Bioanalytical Science and Founding Director of the BBSRC-funded Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology, his roles have included Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), and Director of Research of the Institute of Biological Sciences at the University of Aberystwyth.
He was a Director of Aber Instruments, which won the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement in 1998, and has served on many Committees and Panel, such as BBSRC Council and Strategy Board and the Bioscience for Industry Strategy Panel. He chaired BBSRC's review of Bioenergy research in 2006. He is also a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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