Research School Irregular

We are now advertising a "permanent" post within my team, Research Infrastructure within Research IT.  The team develops and supports the CSF, the Condor Pool and other computational platforms.  More recently we have started to develop Cloud-based services too.

This post would suit someone with good Linux skills who is at the end of their PhD or postdoc contract and who has a good working knowledge of "HPC" systems like The CSF --- a number of the team come from precisely this background.

Interested?  Please do get in touch for an informal chat.

Further details are available at:

https://www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/displayjob.aspx?jobid=18858

Dr Simon Hood
Head of Research Infrastructure and Platforms, IT Services,
University of Manchester, UK.
Associate Technical Director, N8-HPC
+44 (0) 161 306 6650
simon.hood@manchester.ac.uk

PGRs are invited to attend an online open meeting with Vice-President for Research, Professor Colette Fagan and Professor Melissa Westwood, Associate Vice-President for Research on Tuesday, 30 June from 12.15pm to 1pm.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/online-open-meeting-postgraduate-research-tickets-109815304532

This will be an opportunity to hear from Colette, Melissa and the panel and for PGRs to ask questions relating to Postgraduate Research.

Panel Members:

• Professor Stuart Jones, Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research (Faculty of Humanities)

• Nichola Ellis, Postgraduate Research Services Manager (Faculty of Humanities)

• Dr Jeffrey Penny, Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research (Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health)

• Jessica Bowler, Postgraduate Research Services Manager (Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health)

• Professor Sarah Heath, Associate Dean for Post Graduate and Early Career Researchers (Faculty of Science and Engineering)

• Ruth Whelan, Postgraduate Research Services Manager (Faculty of Science and Engineering)

• Helen Baker, Head of Research Degrees and Researcher Development (Directorate of Research and Business Engagement Services)

• Sarah Littlejohn, Head of Campus Life (Directorate for the Student Experience)

• Dr Sophie Hargreaves, Student Services Manager (Student Immigration and Service Delivery Teams, Directorate for the Student Experience)

Places are limited to 300 people so book your place early to avoid disappointment. Please note this event is for PGRs only.

If you would like to submit a question in advance, please include it when you register your place and no later than Tuesday, 23 June.

Alternatively, you can ask a question on the day.

For those unable to attend, the session will be live streamed and also filmed. Simply visit the StaffNet homepage on the day to watch.

Please note, the Zoom link will be circulated prior to the event via email to those who have registered.

Due to the features of low cost, high robustness and reliability, wireless mesh network (WMN) is an essential architecture in next generation of communication network. The self-construction and self-configuration peculiarities can dramatically reduce the complexity of network deployment and maintenance. Multiple hops can extend the coverage area. Because of these strengths, WMN can be used in military and emergency communication, etc. There are two types of mesh nodes in WMN: mesh routers and mesh clients. Mesh routers are always equipped with multiple radio interfaces connected with multiple wireless channels, while mesh clients have a single radio interface.
Routing design which is adaptive for the network features is very important in network design, because an effective routing can greatly improve the whole network performance. Bad path selections will cause congestion, high interference, long delay, and so on. Thus, designing an effective routing method considering link quality in WMN is essential. Nowadays, more and more communication services require little delay and energy consumption, so delay and energy are important factors that need to be considered in the routing design. From the view of the route establishment time, routing design can be categorized into proactive and reactive methods. In proactive routing, in order to achieve the global best network performance, the problem of routing can be formulated as a constrained optimization problem. Minimizing the delay and energy consumption can be the objectives. In reactive routing, each node can select path when needs to transmit packets. As heavy and aggregated load and interference will decrease the performance, load and interference need to be balanced. The hybrid routing combining proactive and reactive routing is effective in WMN with both static and mobile nodes. Simulation results can show the effectiveness of the designed routing methods,

Zoom Meeting ID:970 6036 361

PhD study is a very difficult, stressful and often lonely endeavour in many ways by necessity, because if successful, at the end of your work you will be the world expert on your particular research topic. Because of these characteristics our work may sometimes cause us to be stressed, anxious, depressed or generally unhappy. The first thing you should realise is that you are not alone, these feelings are not just experienced by you, many people have these feelings and experience these situations (at some point in our careers - probably all of us). As a Department (and wider University) we realise that many people are confronting loneliness, pressure and are questioning their ability to complete their PhD.

You should realise that I (Simon) confronted stress when completing my PhD - I was working at a full time job and was also trying to complete the PhD at the same time - I was 'idea rich' but 'time poor' and because I was outside the Department I had no peer support (or at least I felt weird about attending social and peer support events). It took me some time to realise that my PhD thesis was not the end point of the work, and that in some ways it was just an artificially imposed milestone. I was placing a lot of emphasis on writing a perfect Thesis and 'finishing' the work on time. I realised that the thesis would never be perfect and that the work in total could not be completed in 3-4 years. I decided to be pragmatic and do just enough work to get me an OK thesis. So you see, my PhD is not stellar, it is good enough to get me the PhD. I just continued the work after the thesis submission date by doing all the things I wanted to do in the four years after I'd submitted (in my own time). I published zero papers in my PhD but published 14 over those four years after I'd finished it. In my opinion you have to be pragmatic about these things - sometimes you are able to publish papers and write a really good thesis - sometimes you can't (personal circumstances, caring responsibilities, and the topic can all affect that). And I don't know of any Post Doctoral Researchers who are happy with their thesis five years after submitting it, not one. There will always be more to do and more work to undertake, that is what the rest of your life is for.

So please, do realise that you are not alone and we are here to help and support you. The first thing to do is to talk to someone you can trust - this may be your supervisor, advisor, or any of the PGR Academic Team (Simon, Bijan, Xiao-Jun, Sarah, Ian, or Giles).

Whoever you decide to talk to you should also contact the University Support Services and you might find the (we have a subscription) Big White Wall (free online mental health and wellbeing support 24/7) helpful. There is also useful advice on the PGR Life wellbeing page. There are also some excellent ideas about how to manage and stay well. The Counselling and Mental Health Service have this on their website: https://www.counsellingservice.manchester.ac.uk/buildyourmentalhealthexpertise/ Which has some interactive “treatment” resources like Moodgym, ECouch etc. We have booklets which have some self-help CBT based tasks, http://www.selfhelpguides.ntw.nhs.uk/manchester/; also there are some additional resources here: https://www.counsellingservice.manchester.ac.uk/interactive-resources/. And a page specific to PGR that includes some Apps that were trialled by PGRs as part of an OfS project https://www.counsellingservice.manchester.ac.uk/pgr/