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Our Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Global and Civic Engagement, Robin Banerjee, has presented awards to students from Sussex’s partner universities as we celebrated the fantastic achievements of our International Junior Research Associates (IJRA).

16 students from the universities of Mahidol, Warsaw, Charles, Chicago, Zheijiang Gongshang, Southwest, Southern California, the  British University of Vietnam and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, joined Sussex for eight weeks, to experience a career in research and complete a research project supervised by Sussex faculty, who kindly offered their support over the summer months. The IJRA is an annual programme delivered by the Global Engagement team, who working to build enduring partnerships with outstanding global partners, that underpin our initiatives for student and staff mobility, research collaboration and international teaching programmes. Our Partnerships Engagement page details the schemes we’re currently working on, including our IJRA Programme.

Our visitors have made exciting contributions to their fields and wider society through their research, which spans a range of fascinating topics, including; Economics and a project on Household committed consumption and shock responses. Researching Human Rights and International Development, our visitors undertook projects on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, and Queer Identities following Forced Migration. In the field of Life Sciences students researched changes in marine community structure and mapped de-extinction actors. Several of our visitors undertook projects in Artificial intelligence, involving research on reinforcement learning for network congestion, applications of language models on textural sentiment analysis, and exploring solutions for CircuitPython devices.

Our visitors have formed great friendships, supporting each other in their academic endeavours, and getting to know each other through a social programme which included afternoon tea and visits around the UK.

On 21 August an IJRA Showcase event saw our wonderful IJRA’s present their research and talk about their experiences this summer at Sussex.

Louise Turton who leads the IJRA programme on behalf of the Global Engagement team said ‘We are delighted to have been able to host a wonderful group of talented and ambitious students from our close partner universities, and trust that they have left us not only having gained invaluable research experience and a love of Sussex, but also life-long friendships’.