He succeeds Professor John Craven who will retire after 16 years in post.

Professor Galbraith, currently deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Hertfordshire, will join the University in September 2013.

Professor Graham Galbraith

Chairman of the Board of Governors, Stuart Iles, said: “We are delighted to appoint Professor Galbraith as Vice-Chancellor and look forward to welcoming him to the University and to the city.

“He brings with him a wealth of management experience and a strong entrepreneurial outlook which, combined with a substantial record of academic achievement and a thorough understanding of the international and national HE sectors, makes him an ideal person to lead the University forward.“

Professor Galbraith joined the University of Hertfordshire in September 2008 as Deputy Vice-Chancellor. He previously held the role of Pro Vice-Chancellor (International) at Glasgow Caledonian University which he joined in 1993. He gained a BSc(1st class) in Environmental Engineering, an MSc, Mechanical Engineering and a PhD from the University of Strathclyde.

“The University of Portsmouth is well placed to face the challenge of an increasingly competitive market. It is underpinned by sound financial performance and has a strong commitment to providing a first class student experience with excellent student outcomes,” said Professor Galbraith.

“I feel privileged to be offered the opportunity to lead the University through its next stage of development.”

Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Geoff Long, and other SA Agulhas crew members.

University of Portsmouth sports science technician Geoff Long is currently on board SA Agulhas as she makes her way south carrying Sir Ranulph Fiennes and his six man team to begin the first ever attempt to cross the Antarctic during winter.

Geoff is blogging about his journey, as well as tweeting about his experiences.  Read all about his life on board ship and the preparations the team is making for the record attempt.

A senior specialist technician, Geoff will carry out technical work, as well as testing the kit, which includes clothing, skis, and Caterpillar tractor units towing cabooses and fuel, to make sure it is operable before the team set off.

The team will be covering the route travelled in Sir Fiennes’ Transglobe Expedition of 1979-1982.

The trip will take up to nine months, with the team due to arrive in the Antarctic in February, where Geoff and the rest of the support crew will leave the ice team.

SA Agulhas landing in Antarctica

The team has sailed from Cape Town via the Greenwich Meridian to do some Marine Science, heading towards Crown Bay, Dronning Maud Land. The last stages of the crossing will be down the Leverett Glacier and into McMurdo Station. The team will then head to a piece of sea-ice or shelf ice (whatever they find suitable) about 200km from the Belgian base Belare, at which point they will be retrieved by their ship when the sea ice becomes navigable in the spring.

Antarctica in full winter experiences 24 hour darkness and an ambient operating temperature range of – 40 to – 70C. Wind chill will drive down the effective temperature further. Although dark there will be significant light reflected from the moon depending upon its phase and cloud cover.

At 10,000ft the thinner air on the plateau will further stress the vehicle engines until they have acclimatised and will also test the expedition crew. The air outside will be dry, 0 per cent humidity, which increases the effects of frostbite.

Geoff Long and Sir Ranulph Fiennes

While they are in the Antarctic, the team will undertake valuable scientific work to support the work that is normally carried out by scientists from across the globe in summer.

It is the first time Geoff has been to the Antarctic, and he was invited after taking part in a preparation trip with the team in Sweden last year.

The team is attempting to raise £10million for Seeing is Believing to support their efforts against preventable blindness around the world. People can donate here.

Professor Bob Nichol

The Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) has been awarded its first “Consolidated Grant” from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

The grant, which covers the full range of research undertaken at ICG, is for a total of £1.72 million pounds over the next three years. It will help support a range of staff, visitors and researchers, as well as some of the travel and computing needs.

Professor Bob Nichol, Director of ICG and Principal Investigator of the grant said, “This grant represents a major achievement for the ICG in these tough times.”
“We will be able to fund research into all aspects of the universe, from the moment of creation to the complexities of galaxy formation and evolution. We also gain important postdoctoral support to exploit our membership of international experiments like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Dark Energy Survey (DES)”.

The grant provides core funding for ICG until April 2016.

View and send your e-card here.

Dr Dan Pinchbeck

A computer game originally created by a University team has won in six categories at an industry awards ceremony.

Dr Dan Pinchbeck and his studio thechineseroom, originally set-up as a research project within the University of Portsmouth, won in six categories in the TIGA awards.

Independent game studio thechineseroom created Dear Esther, the brainchild of Dr Pinchbeck of the School of Creative Technologies. The full independent release of the game was based on Dr Pinchbeck’s experimental and award-winning design. The concept was designed to break new ground in gaming, exploring new types of gameplay and storytelling in first-person gaming.

The game received awards for Best Action/Adventure Game 2012, Best Debut Game 2012, Best Visual Design 2012, Best Audio Design 2012, Originality Award 2012 and Best Start-up Business 2012.

Dr Pinchbeck said “It’s really unusual for a game of this nature to have won so many awards. We’re very pleased with the product, which was originally an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project for the University of Portsmouth. To have seen it grow into an award winning game has been a real journey.”

The TIGA Awards are designed to celebrate creative and technical excellence and to commend business proficiency in the games industry. The awards highlight best practice and reward those in the industry contributing to its long-term innovation.

Dr Richard Wilson, TIGA CEO said: “The TIGA Awards demonstrated the creativity and technical excellence of the UK games industry and highlighted some great examples of business professionalism in our sector. The awards have shown that the games development and digital publishing sector is one of our most impressive industries.”

Former law students and lecturers reunite

Former students at the University of Portsmouth discussed how best to use their legal skills to help some of the city’s poorest, most disadvantaged people.

Graduates of the School of Law, many of whom are professionally qualified, reunited for the School’s first alumni dinner.

Head of the School of Law, Caroline Strevens, said: “Charities exist to help people in need and quite often those needs include legal assistance.”

The School of Law already runs an impressive portfolio of free community engagement programmes, including an employment law clinic staffed by current law students, a mediation service for neighbours caught up in a dispute, the Innocence Project to help fight miscarriages of justice, and working with the British Red Cross to help support asylum seekers and refugees.

Caroline said: “We are about to launch a new debt clinic and a scheme whereby our students provide governance support for local charitable organisations. Support from our alumni will enable us to do even more.”

The meeting was followed by the School’s inaugural alumni dinner at the Queen’s Hotel in Southsea.  About 70 former students attended.  As well as seeing old friends and teachers, they had the opportunity to see how the School had developed since they graduated.

In the mock courtroom, they saw the advanced technology used for advocacy training followed by a practical demonstration from current students.

Caroline praised the event and said: “It was a great opportunity for our former students to see how the School is developing.

“Many won’t have seen the courtroom or have known it isn’t just for those who wish to be barristers, but can be used by anyone who needs to learn how to persuade and defend their opinion.

“The courtroom benefits the whole University community. Many of our students, including drama, social work, and psychology students, do work where involvement in court proceedings is possible. The mock courtroom also enables us to build links with external authorities, such as Youth Offending Teams and Forensic Services, so the benefits are not only academic.”

At their dinner, alumni also heard an address from the Director of Service Prosecutions, Bruce Houlder, QC, on the challenges he faces in trying to ensure that troops in operational theatres have the freedom to fight without fear of legal sanction, but are prosecuted properly if ever they overstep the mark.

The event was held to launch the Law School Alumni association and resulted in many former students offering their time and advice to support the Community Engagement and other activities of the Law School.

Astronomers at the University of Portsmouth, the only UK institution to be involved, have  been part of an international effort to measure the rate the universe was

An illustration showing how SDSS-III was able to measure the distant Universe.
Light rays from distant quasars (dots at left) are partially absorbed as they pass through clouds of intergalactic hydrogen gas (centre). When the light arrives at the spectrograph of the Sloan Foundation 2.5-Meter Telescope (square at right), some has been absorbed, leaving behind a record in the form of a “forest” of small absorption lines in the observed spectrum.
These lines can be interpreted to make a map of the gas along the line of sight between us and the quasar. By examining light from thousands of quasars all over the sky, astronomers can make a detailed three-dimensional map of the distant universe.
In this illustration, the dots at the far left are quasars, and the thin lines show light rays that left those quasars more than 10 billion years ago. Yellow dots are quasars that had been measured by prior projects of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. By measuring the spectra from ten times as many quasars in this range (red dots), BOSS can reveal the large-scale structure of the early universe in much greater detail.
Illustration credit: Zosia Rostomian, LBNL; Nic Ross, BOSS Lyman-alpha team, LBNL; and Springel et al, Virgo Consortium and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics

expanding in its youth, just three billion years after the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is estimated to have happened 13.75 billion years ago, so this study is going back to when the universe was very young. This is the first time scientists have been able to map so far into the past.

Dr Mat Pieri, Marie Curie research fellow at University of Portsmouth and co-author of the study said: “We already know about the universe in its infancy using the afterglow of the Big Bang.

“We have seen the universe reach maturity by looking at the distribution of distant galaxies in the second half of its history.

“Only now are we finally seeing its adolescence by exploring the distribution of gas on the largest scales in the first half of its history, just before it underwent a growth spurt.”

In the last five billion years the universe has started to rapidly expand, due to a mysterious repulsive force that scientists have named ‘dark energy’. This study, undertaken by astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), looks at the universe when it was young, and its growth was being slowed by the effects of gravity.

Dr Pieri said: “If we think of the universe as a roller coaster, then today we are rushing downhill, gaining speed as we go.

“Our new measurement tells us about the time when the universe was climbing the hill — still being slowed by gravity.

“It looks like the roller coaster crested the hill just about seven billion years ago, and we’re still going.”

The results were presented in a paper submitted to the journal ‘Astronomy and Astrophysics’ and posted today on the arXiv.org preprint site.

A graph showing how the Universe’s expansion rate has changed over the last ten billion years.
Until recently, three-dimensional maps by BOSS and other surveys were able to measure the regular distribution of galaxies back to only about five and a half billion years ago, a time when the expansion of the Universe was already accelerating.
The numbers along the bottom of the graph show the time in the Universe’s past, in billions of years. The vertical scale (y-axis) shows the expansion rate of the Universe; higher means the Universe was expanding faster. These older measurements appear as data points toward the right of the graph.
The new SDSS-III measurements, shown as the data point to the far left, have now probed the structure of the early Universe at a time when expansion was still slowing down.
Credit: Zosia Rostomian, LBNL, and Nic Ross, BOSS Lyman-alpha team, LBNL

The new measurement makes use of the clustering of intergalactic hydrogen gas in the distant universe. We can see this gas because it absorbs some light from quasars lying behind. When we measure the spectrum of a quasar, we see not only the light emitted by the quasar, but also what happened to that light in its long journey to Earth. When we look at a quasar’s spectrum, we can see how the intervening gas absorbs some of the quasar’s light. Measuring this absorption — a phenomenon known as the Lyman-alpha forest — yields a detailed picture of the gas between the quasar and us.

Professor Will Percival, Professor of Cosmology at University of Portsmouth said:  “It’s a very useful technique: we’re essentially measuring the shadows cast by gas along a series of lines, each billions of light-years long.

“The tricky part is combining all those one-dimensional maps. The problem is like trying to recognise an object from a picture that’s been painted on the quills of a porcupine.”

This technique uses so called “baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO)”: echoes frozen into matter soon after the Big Bang, as a “standard ruler” to compare the size of the universe at various points in its history. This was pioneered by SDSS in 2005 using the locations of galaxies, but using that ruler comes with its own difficulties because galaxies that are far away are also very faint.

Last year, astronomers used the first 10,000 quasars from SDSS-III’s Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) to make the first large-scale map of the structure of the faraway “Lyman-alpha forest” gas. As enormous as that map was, it was still not large enough to detect the subtle variations of BAOs. But the new map is big enough — it measures the Lyman-alpha forest using light from 50,000 quasars all over the sky.

“No place in the universe is really empty. There is gas in even the most remote parts of the universe and we have used it to measure how the universe expands. “ said Dr Pieri.

“This expansion is telling us that there is more than just gas out there – it seems that space itself comes with its own energy and the more space you have, the more of this ‘dark energy’ there is.”

The team’s new measurement of the BAOs, combined with measurements at other points in the universe’s history, paints a picture of how the universe has evolved over its history. The picture that emerges is consistent with our current understanding of the universe — that dark energy is a constant part of space throughout the cosmos. What is fascinating about the new result is that, for the first time, we see how dark energy worked at a time before the universe’s current acceleration started.

The Lyman alpha forest technique is itself in its youth. Professor Bob Nichol, said: “Our goal for BOSS was to measure the expansion of the Universe. We planned to make that measurement in two ways — one a sure thing and one a risky new idea.

“It’s really exciting that, thanks to the dedicated work of so many people, we know that both methods work. We have shown that the Lyman-alpha forest can accurately measure the expansion of the Universe when it was only one-fifth its current age.”

SDSS-III will continue to learn more about dark energy as it collects more than a million and half galaxies and more than 160,000 quasars by the end of the survey.  Now that the Lyman-alpha technique is no longer just a risky idea, SDSS-III will make it a standard method by which astronomers explore the nature of the faraway Universe

Emily Lloyd as Linda in Wish You Were Here — one of the now iconic films screened on Film on Four. Credit:  Film4/Zenith/Working Title

The research of University of Portsmouth experts was celebrated at a major national conference as part of Channel 4’s 30^th birthday celebrations.

Dr Justin Smith, of the University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Research, is head of the Channel 4 and British Film Culture research team.

The research team’s outputs over four years culminated in a two-day conference at London’s Southbank which brought together media historians and key personnel from film and television industries to review Channel 4’s contribution to British film culture over three decades. The conference also debated the future of public service broadcasters’ support for UK film.

The conference was a showcase of four years of research at Portsmouth funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in partnership with the British Universities Film and Video Council.

Dr Smith said: “In the early 1980s British cinema was in the doldrums but Channel 4’s Film on Four strand quickly transformed the traditional 90-minute drama, producing hits like My Beautiful Laundrette and Letter to Brezhnev which enjoyed cinema releases before television broadcast.

“These films have become national treasures and it’s no exaggeration to say that Film on Four brought the British film industry back from the brink.”

As part of the same research project, the Portsmouth Film Society is screening the Film on Four’s classic Wish You Were Here at the New Theatre Royal tomorrow (Tuesday, November 6) as part of a season of films put together by Dr Smith.

Dr Smith said: “As well as the conference in London we wanted to do something to locally to mark the occasion of Channel 4’s Film on Four’s 30^th anniversary. What better way than to choose some classics from Film4’s great back catalogue and screen them in the city?”

To look at the complete range of workshops available and make your booking online, go to: www.port.ac.uk/ask/workshops.

For details of all our services and resources visit: www.port.ac.uk/ask.

Thursday 25^th October – Tin can herb garden

Grow your own herb garden in a recycled container.  We will provide the soil and the seeds – you just need to bring the container whether it is a tin can, sunflower spread tub or small milk carton! It’s also your chance to find out about Green Impact Excellence and how the Students’ Union is committed to environmental sustainability.

1-3pm, outside the Students’ Union, Cambridge Road entrance. Free activity.

Thursday 25 October – Sharing Destiny – Moving Towards One World (Portsmouth One World Week)

Stalls, displays, speakers, fairtrade international buffet (Buffet plus soft drink – £5 tickets in advance only from University catering outlets) and a “fish bowl” discussion to share how we can work together for a better world.   For more information contact sue.james@yahoo.com

7pm-9:15pm, The Hub, Dennis Sciama Building

Friday 26 October –  Bike maintenance with the Cycling Club

To make your bike last and to get the most out of it you need to look after it. Check in at the bike maintenance stall for a bike “MOT”.

11am-2pm, outside the Students’ Union, Cambridge Road entrance. Donation to WWF.

Friday 26^th October –  Bottle top mosaic

You cannot recycle plastic bottle tops with most councils… bottle caps are made of recyclable plastic so why can’t they be recycled too? Here at the Union we’ve been busy collecting them…we have approx 1,000 bottle tops…come and help us recycle them by creating a beautiful bottle top mosaic!

12am -4pm, outside the Students’ Union, Cambridge Road entrance. Free activity.

For further information visit www.upsu.net or contact VP Activities Grant Clarke grant@upsu.net or giveitago@upsu.net