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The generosity of alumni, staff and friends has enabled the ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº Friends Programme to award more than £280,000 to 27 projects around the university this year.

£20,000 was allocated to graduate scholarships as well as an award of £30,000 to support a two-year Ramsay Fellowship in the Department of Chemistry. The new grants also include £80,000 to the Friends Programme Student Hardship Fund, which was established in 1995 to help those students suffering financial difficulties to continue their studies.

A project to develop the first online global drought monitor will benefit from a grant of £9,899. Led by Dr Mark Saunders, of the Department of Space & Climate Physics, the project will build a drought monitor designed to help humanitarian aid organisations.The monitor will improve drought awareness and assist warnings of potential food, water and health emergencies. The International Red Cross, Oxfam and Action Aid have all expressed an interest in the product, which until now has only ever existed for the North American region.

A scheme, led by the Department of Geomatic Engineering, to map and visualise the ongoing £250 million building programme at ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº has secured £15,000 of funding. The project will use state-of-the-art surveying, CAD/CAM lighting and visualisation environments to enable users to explore Virtual ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº. The virtual environment will help the ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº community to better understand the scale and impact of the current expansion by providing accurate 3D visualisations.

The Slade School of Fine Art has been awarded £12,000 to implement a practice-led research project into artists' books. The project will be a collaborative effort between invited artists and creative writers using the medium of printmaking and bookbinding. The books, each in an edition of 8-10, plus two unbound copies, will be made in the Slade's printmaking and bookbinding studios and produced by the Slade Press.

Other projects supported this year include: an award of £14,500 to provide appropriate storage facilities for the Petrie Palestinian Collection and the prehistoric Cypriot Collection; £5,000 to the Centre for Medical Humanities to host an international conference promoting collaboration between the arts and humanities and clinical medicine; and £7,500 to the Faculty of Laws to replace old computers and benching in the departmental computer cluster room. Now in its ninth year, the ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº Friends Programme has made more than 200 grants to support academic initiatives and student activities across ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº. A letter and telephone campaign is underway to inform former students of the difference made by alumni support and to ask them to consider giving to ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº.

To find out more about the ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº Friends Programme use the link below.

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