As we head into the Christmas break, it’s now a good time to take stock of the recent developments and early plans for next year across the School.

Last month we were delighted to appoint the new Research Director, Professor Steve Wood. While it’s early days in his role, Steve has started the process of forming a Research Committee, with the objective to strengthen the School’s research culture and environment even further.

We are pleased to announce that University Student Enterprise team have taken up residence at Surrey Business School. This new high profile space will allow even more students from across campus to access Surrey Student Enterprise activities and will strengthen the support the team receives from the School.

 CoDE (Centre for the Digital Economy) have had some recent funding success with a research bid to EPSRC for: Addressing Cybersecurity and Cybercrime via a co-Evolutionary approach to reducing human-related risks. The grant is led by Dr Shujun Li in Computer Science and includes the strong involvement of Dr Mike McGuire in Sociology. So, this grant is the result of a great inter-Faculty collaboration, which we will be seeing more of in the new year. Other Universities involved include UCL Security and Crime Science and Warwick Manufacturing Group. The grant is for 24 months and the value is £1.1M. The grant adds to CoDE’s expanding list of research awards.

Further plans for the new year will be to significantly expand our Executive Education programmes, which is well underway. Our plans include both open-enrolment and tailor-made Executive Education activities, as well as one day programmes.

As we look back at the last year, I am inspired with confidence for the year ahead and the many new achievements yet to be reached.