Operations

We had a number of staff turnovers in several teams, such as Finance, Laboratory Operations, and Education.

The Institute Manager, Wing-Chau Tung, went on secondment and Nick Burt was recruited as Deputy Institute Manager. As of October 2024, Nick Burt is now the Acting Institute Manager until further notice. In the first half of the year, following the annual Operations’ survey, we conducted a series of focus groups with staff and students to assess the effectiveness of our services.

Our SoCo (Social Committee) initiatives

A big thank you to our amazing SoCo (Social Committee) team for all their hard work in making sure we all felt welcome, engaged, and well cared for this past year.

In 2023-2024, the SoCo team successfully organised weekly activities such as Tuesday Breakfast Club, Thursday Afternoon Break, and Friday Yoga. With help from the institute's EDI team, they also began offering free daily coffee mornings, where people can enjoy coffee and hot chocolate from the coffee machine between 10:30am and 11am. The team worked together with groups like the ECR committee, the EDI team, the Wellbeing team, the new Technicians Network, and the Oriel communication and engagement team to host several events. They joined forces for fundraising activities such as the London Marathon 2023, London Swimathon 2023, and Christmas Jumper Day 2023 to support Save the Children charity. Additionally, they collaborated with Marilyn Bryan, the institute’s executive assistant, to create a special display for Black History Month in October 2024. They are currently gathering feedback to help make their activities even better. If you are a student or a member of staff at the institute make sure to fill out their feedback survey. 
More recently the team cleaned up and organised the book swap and games/puzzle area in the Common Room for everyone to enjoy.

Members of the SoCo Team are: 
Pedro Fale
Gabriella Bordeanu
Curtis Chan
Yixing Xia
Mathilde Roquete Viana Neto
Rachel McKenzie
Rhianna Williams
Dhani Tracey-White

You can reach them at ioo.soco@ucl.ac.uk.

EDI initiatives at IoO this year

• IoO Free Coffee mornings. All staff and students can now enjoy free daily morning coffee throughout the week, expanding from the specific Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon events set up previously by IoO SoCo. This initiative aims to promote networking across different research themes and to encourage interaction between staff and students alike.
• SoCo and the EDI Team are working together to put on events that include a celebration of different cultures as well as providing opportunities for socialising.
• Lunchtime EDI Discussion. This discussion group aims to provide a platform for open dialogue, learning and connection while gaining valuable perspectives. The group was set up in spring and has so far met four times with discussions of a wide range of topics related to EDI.
• IoO Survey 2024. More than 70% of staff and PhD students completed the online survey. We will be using these results to see if past actions have worked and to determine actions going into the future.
• iLeadup.  Noha Soliman, Jocelyn Cammack and Rashmi G Mathew, all members of the team, have financed and carried out a qualitative, action research investigation called the iLeadup Project, looking at the lived experience of white and global majority Early Career Researchers, and the impact any differences may have on academic progress and wellbeing.

Communications and outreach

This year we continued to expand our reputation and reach. In addition to 450 research papers published in prominent national and international journals in the field of vision science, we continued to develop the content of our website by adding among other things: recordings of our inaugural lectures, news updates showcasing students’ achievements, spotlights profiling some of our academics, and our annual review publications.

With support from our Faculty, we initiated a process to streamline our web pages in preparation for an important upgrade of our content management system, set to go live in 2025. This process, which is still ongoing, involves removing outdated pages and improving site navigation. 

Following new guidance issued by UCL at the beginning of the year, regarding best practice for newsletters, we discontinued the production of the weekly bulletin in April. We continue to disseminate a Monthly Update newsletter to all staff and students. This includes a message from our institute's director along with key updates from the rest of the institute and UCL.

We observed a substantial increase in views and impressions across all our social media platforms. Our YouTube channel saw an impressive 260% growth in subscriptions, with the video titled We are UCL Institute of Ophthalmology reaching 13,000 views in under nine months. Additionally, we recorded a 4.5% increase in followers on X and an 18% increase on LinkedIn. Our social media campaign on the occasion of Eye Health Week (21-29 September) saw great engagement across X, LinkedIn and Facebook with an average of 20 'likes' for each post on X. As of last week, we have now established a presence on the emerging social media platform Bluesky, following a coordinated approach led by our Faculty Communications team.