The University of Liverpool has one Graduate School for all disciplines. The School’s annual Poster Day (27 March, in 2009) enables all these fields to be showcased together. I had the happy task with a few other ‘external’ judges of selecting the first-ever prizewinner for the new ‘North West Hub’ award, to emphasise links between academia and the wider world.
Education & Life-Long Learning and Knowledge Economy.
The exemplary aims of Poster Day are to offer graduate students practice in the skills required to communicate to a degree educated public, and to provide an opportunity for them to learn more about research being undertaken in other parts of the University.

The University of Liverpool Graduate School Poster Day exhibition was fascinating; the cross-faculty range of work under one roof would surely have taken months to get fully to grips with, but we had just a couple of hours. I used the time to talk to some very interesting people, all passionate about their work and the reasons they were doing it.



The involvement of ‘external’ visitors was a new step introduced this year. Here we see some of the Graduate School Team, including Dr Richard Hinchcliffe (Director of Postgraduate Training) with my fellow judges:

But in the end we had to make a decision, spoilt for choice though we certainly were.
The general criteria for the North West Hub overall prize included visual impact, organisation of the material, the accessibility of and rationale for the research, and, last but not least, the enthusiasm and clarity of the researcher him or herself. It seems very fitting that the award was after much discussion made to Andrew Lee-Mortimer for his engineering research project around Design for Sustainability.

Read more articles about Education & Life-Long Learning and about the Knowledge Economy.