Welcome note
Welcome a little belatedly to the start of 2020 and a new decade. While I hope you all had a good break over the holiday period it has been a devastating start to the year for many communities across our part of Australia. The impact of smoke on our local community has been felt strongly with our air quality reaching dangerous levels and our campus closing down. This provided an opportunity though for some amazing community outreach and leadership from our own ANU students, who organised donated masks from students arriving back to Canberra from interstate. They then distributed the masks to vulnerable people across Canberra before the government released masks from the national stockpiles. I hope that you are just as impressed as I am and read more about this good news story here.
The university community has also been impacted by hail and coronavirus. If you have concerns about the impact on your research program please talk to your supervisor, HDR Convener or the Graduate Research Office gro@anu.edu.au.
I should also say a very special welcome to all our newly commencing candidates and I very much look forward to meeting you at our induction events over the next couple of months. If you have already started you perhaps haven’t seen the campus at its best yet, but I’m confident that you will quickly come to appreciate what a lovely place ANU is, as well as enjoy being part of our thriving HDR community.
Finally I am still enjoying my time as interim Dean HDR, and look forward to what will be an interesting year. I trust there will be continuing improvements and enhancements to the collective HDR experience, flowing not just from the Redefining the ANU PhD White Paper which gained approval at the highest levels late last year, but also from other ongoing projects including the HDR Supervisor Development and HDR Admissions projects. Once again, welcome to 2020.
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Professor Ann Evans
Interim Dean HDR
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