Vice Principal for Health, Professor Sir Mark Caulfield, comments on Rites of Passage and NIHR funding for IAT.
Graduates outside St Paul's Cathedral at the Rites of Passage 2023 event.
Dear all,
Graduation season is in full swing and on Monday I had the great pleasure of presiding over two ceremonies celebrating our new doctors and dentists at Mile End. This was followed in the evening with a spectacular Rites of Passage in St Paul’s Cathedral where our students (or rather our newly inducted alumni) marked their achievement with their families and peers. Every doctor and dentist who crossed the stage on that day is an enormous success story, ready to carry on our mission of bringing about ‘Better health for all’. Thanks to everyone who made this success story possible. Our students are the beating heart of our Faculty who, once they graduate, take a section of our heart with them and use it to keep the heart of humanity beating.
This week we received excellent news from NIHR who approved funding for 28 Academic Clinical Fellowships and 17 Clinical Lectureships in our Faculty for 2023/24 and 2024/2025 academic years. Many thanks to Prof Marta Korbonits, Prof Will Alazawi and Bijal Tailor who worked extremely hard to secure this allocation. The Integrated Academic Training competition is a very crowded field and securing funding for almost every post we applied for is a fantastic result.
NIHR have also funded a capital award of £4.885 million out of a total of 90 million to Barts Health and Queen Mary that will create clinical research MRI and CT scanning capacity and new proteomics infrastructure. This is the largest award granted in the south of England, made possible through efforts of Kieran McCafferty, Rupert Pearse and the NIHR Barts Biomedical Research Centre.
Have a good and restful weekend.
Mark