New SDP scholarship fund for outstanding students at the Creative Industries Faculty, QUT

We are really delighted to announce the establishment of a new SDP scholarship fund for outstanding students at the Creative Industries Faculty (CIF) in Queensland University of Technology. The scholarship has been established thanks to a very generous personal gift from Prof. John Hartley, who was the founding Dean of the Creative Industries Faculty and is a longstanding friend of the OII. The scholarship will enable outstanding CIF PhD students in the field of digital media and communication to attend our annual Summer Doctoral Programme, and will be available for the next 5-6 years with matched funding possible to support a second student if more than one excellent candidate is selected by OII.

This scholarship is particularly meaningful to us as it crystallises the longstanding relationship we’ve built with QUT around the Summer Doctoral Programme. In addition to sending excellent students every year, the Faculty hosted the programme in Brisbane in 2009 with great professionalism (and better weather than the typical Oxford summer…) providing a really memorable experience for our own faculty as well as the participants.

In addition to the obvious synergies of research agendas and educational goals, we’ve made many firm friends amongst the faculty during that period, two of whom (Jean Burgess, now Director of Research Training, and Marcus Foth, the Founder and Director of the Urban Informatics Lab) started out as students in our second SDP cohort in 2004. We thus see the establishment of this scholarship as a wonderful recognition of the value of SDP, from both an individual and an institution whom we greatly value working with. Thank you!

Victoria Nash, SDP Director