Imperial celebrates academic promotions

Annual promotion round sees over 135 academics from the Business School and the Faculties of Engineering, Medicine and Natural Sciences promoted.

Professor Peter Lindstedt, Assistant Provost (Academic Promotions), said:

“I would like to offer my congratulations to all College staff promoted this year – I was hugely impressed by the standard of candidates across everyfaculty. We have faced another year of disruption and change, but despite this Imperial staff have continued to demonstrate excellence in research and teaching while contributing towards Imperial Expectations.

“The Promotions Panels considered 142 applicants and 522 reference letters as part of the process and I would like to thank everyone involved for making it possible for us to complete this year’s Academic Promotions. I would also like to express my gratitude to the members of staff who joined the Academic Promotions Panel over the last two years as part of efforts to be mindful of under-representation and to balance research and teaching. We will continue to monitor the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the 2022 promotion round.”

Professor Sankalp Chaturvedi, Imperial College Business School, promoted to Professor of Organisation Behaviour and Leadership

I am an engineer with a Ph.D. in Organizational Behaviour and I have been at Imperial for 13 years. My academic goals have always been inspired bytwo words – ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘impact’ on society. It’s important for me to create a wider impact and I try to solve real-world problems and benefit society by challenging the traditional status-quo. I believe that leaders are in a unique position to create substantial and sustainable change through their ideas and authentic behaviours.

My research into organizational behaviour has an emphasis on leadership, mindfulness, and collaboration mechanisms in teams. Broadly, I take an interdisciplinary lens to understand how leaders can be more effective across contexts. Previously I investigated whether leaders are ‘born’ or ‘made’ via behavioural genetics methodology.

Most recently, I have examined how ‘mindfulness’ (a concept rooted in Buddhism) can help reduce employee stress, improve mental health, well-being and impact positive work outcomes. I hope to pursue this research as it will be one of the most sought after non-intrusive and proactive solutions to manage mental health in the hybrid world.

I seek to have a positive impact on society through my research, teaching and service (as the Director of the Gandhi Centre for Inclusive Innovation). For me, the greatest innovations happen on the cusp of different disciplines and Imperial is rightly positioned to help tackle Grand Challenges such as climate change and mental health.

In my job, which doesn’t feel like a job, I enjoy the freedom to explore challenging ideas through collaboration with other disciplines while learning in the process. It’s a pleasure to interact and learn from students from so many diverse backgrounds and countries every year. I love it when they find my taught lessons useful in their work and life years after they have left Imperial.

Professor Camille Petit, Department of Chemical Engineering promoted to Professor of Material Engineering

My education and academic career have been rather ‘traditional’ but they have taken me places, allowing me to meet many people and experience diverse working styles. I studied for my BSc and MSc in France and then moved to the States to conduct my PhD at the City University of New York and my postdoctoral research project at Columbia University. I finally joined Imperial as a Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering in 2013.

My research group investigates porous functional materials for molecular separations (e.g. CO2 capture) and solar fuels production. These topics directly relate to the sustainability of our future energy portfolio. Molecular separations represent 10 to 15% of the worldwide energy consumption and renewables will occupy an increasing share of the energy mix. We are studying how porous materials can help replace traditional energy-intensive separation technologies and support the development of new sustainable energy pathways.

This research allows us to bridge many scales: from the nanoscale where the materials properties are controlled to an industrial scale where the materials are applied to tackle global challenges. Exploiting the diversity and multitude of porous materials is what makes our work challenging and exciting!

I feel immense pride and responsibility in working on intellectually stimulating topics alongside talented individuals in the research lab and in the classroom.

Dr Morgan Beeby, Department of Life Sciences promoted to Reader in Structural Biology

I’m interested in fundamental questions on how life works: more than ever, I think it’s crucial that we continue to explore our world and refresh our senseof awe for the universe we inhabit. My research focuses on the flagellum or ‘tail’ of bacteria which helps them to swim. The flagellum is spun like a propeller by a tiny motor. Fascinatingly, the flagellar motors from different bacterial species have different proteins bolted to them, modifying how each motor behaves. A few years ago it struck me that this mimicks – at the molecular scale – what Darwin’s finches represented in the 1800s.

Curiously, though, by bolting new proteins on to their flagellar motor, the bacteria are doing something that is fundamentally different to the evolution of big animals. There is no gradual change across time: instead, a fundamentally new component of the bacterial flagellum is formed. I want to understand the meaning of these differences and the mechanisms behind their emergence. I hope that my research will shed light on aspects of evolution on a molecular scale that we haven’t had case studies for previously.

Whilst my focus is on the big questions about the building blocks of life there is a huge potential for practical application of this work by others. For example, gaining an understanding how the flagellum of the Salmonella bacteria works might enable us to ‘jam it’ so that it can no longer move through our gut causing food poisoning.

I love working with the other researchers in my lab. They are really intelligent people and being on an adventure with them to find a new thing is exciting. It’s hard to imagine many other jobs that would enable that.

Dr Céire Costelloe, School of Public Health promoted to Reader in Digital Health

My work focuses on the use of routinely collected clinical data and electronic health record data to predict risk, inform digital innovation, and evaluate interventions in practice across the healthcare economy. The work spans modelling, including research into the impact of vaccines on antimicrobial resistance, developing and testing digital interventions for infection outcomes such as sepsis, and studying patient and population level impacts of digital tools such as UK patient portals and the NHS app.

I came to Imperial on the back of working as a clinical trials statistician in UKCRC clinical trials units at Queen Mary and the University of Bristol. But I am really interested in how we can make the best use of existing routinely collected clinical data to inform clinical decision making and healthcare practice. I now work on using these data to inform and evaluate digital health interventions, and enjoy all the methodological challenges that brings!