Category: International Alumni

Lesley Silvester, Chair of the US-based University of Bristol Foundation, reflects on the importance of  the US Foundation giving in making Bristol great. 

To quote our Vice Chancellor and President Hugh Brady, ‘Philanthropy will increasingly be a critical determinant of Bristol’s success’, asserting that it is a key component in supporting students, recruiting world-class staff and funding research. The Board of the US Foundation understands that such giving can make the difference between a good university and a great one. To that end we are playing an increasingly significant role through our focus on several specific philanthropic goals.

A primary objective has been and continues to be to increase both the amount of support and the number of alumni donors within the US based alumni community. A second goal – complementing the first – is the development of an increasingly strong and vibrant alumni community. Happily, though not surprisingly, the more we reach out and expand our alumni network in the States, the more it becomes apparent that we have a wide and accomplished group with whom to engage. At best count, which we believe in all probability is understated, we have over 5,500 alumni residing here. And we’d like to connect with every one of you.

Key to us achieving our goals is the University’s Development and Alumni Relations Office (DARO) strategy of significantly growing engagement and volunteering partnerships not only in the UK but internationally. The relationship between DARO and the US Foundation has been considerably strengthened over the past few years, as we have aligned around shared goals, communications and events. We can clearly see the powerful mutual benefits to both Bristol and its alumni by building community across all University stakeholders.

At our September Foundation board meeting, Jim Rucker – who has served as a Foundation Director for ten years and has contributed to many of our efforts – retired, and two new directors were elected and welcomed to the group. They are Tim Richie (BA 1978) who resides in Massachusetts and California and Tim Parton (BSc 1986) who lives in the New York area.

During the week of 11 November alumni events were held across the US, in New York, San Francisco and Boston in connection with the Vice Chancellor’s visit. We were delighted that many of you joined us, and hope that you are enjoying being part of the University’s burgeoning community, and are as excited as I am about the University’s vision for its future.

On behalf of the entire Foundation Board we wish you a very happy holiday season and look forward to further engagement in 2020.

Lesley Silvester, University of Bristol Foundation Chair based in the US, highlights the significant role the US Alumni play in funding key initiatives and programmes including the Sanctuary Scholarships.  

Each month we see more concrete examples of initiatives and programmes that realise the ambitious strategies committed to within the last five years. The alumni in the US are playing an increasingly significant role in the philanthropic funding of such initiatives channelled through the US Foundation.

For example, at our Foundation meeting in March, it was reported that the US is contributing one-third of the total philanthropic giving towards the Sanctuary Scholarships. These are scholarships provided to refugee and asylum-seeking students in the UK. Another example is the $75,000 we have contributed to the Bristol Futures Scholarships. You may recall the moving video that was recently distributed featuring a student who is a very grateful recipient of such a scholarship and which has given her the means to fully participate in all the University has to offer. These scholarships, as you know, are a key component in facilitating wider participation in the University.

Further, there is evidence that US alumni have a greater propensity to give than those in the UK – perhaps this comes from exposure to the culture in the US of supporting one’s alma mater, perhaps it is a matter of greater valuing at a distance what Bristol provided? We hope it is evidence of the US alumni community continuing to gather strength.

For those of you that have contributed, the US Foundation Board thanks you! For those alumni still considering such gifts, we hope you will be motivated by the inspiring developments afoot at Bristol.

Why did you choose Bristol?
At Bristol, I studied for a BSc in Zoology, with Chemistry and Microbiology as subsidiary subjects. I chose Bristol because it offered me an Open Exhibition based on merit, not need (in fact I was means-tested out of the financial benefits, so my gratitude to Bristol is not based on funding). I very much enjoyed my scholarship interview, I couldn’t answer any of the questions and was therefore asked to extemporize on how I would approach the problems presented. This became the basis for one of the interviewers later recommending me for a fellowship at Cambridge for my PhD.

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Ely J Kahn reports on how the University of Bristol is connecting with alumni communities outside of the UK

For the past several years, the University of Bristol has placed increased emphasis on its alumni communities outside the United Kingdom. The United States, where the University’s American Foundation holds sway, has received — along with the alumni communities in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore — increased attention over recent years. This mirrors a heightened overarching recognition by the University on the importance of alumni and their support, both financial and, if you will, emotional.

As part of our ‘Made in Bristol’ interview series, alumnus Steve Kay (BSc 1981, PhD 1985, Hon DSc 2014) takes us through his journey from Bristol to becoming one of the world’s leading scientists.

My job as a scientist is to come into work each day and see something new in Nature that nobody else has seen before. Engaging the incredible diversity of life that has evolved on this planet makes my hair stand on end some days. Bristol nurtured that awe. I initially went to Oxford to do medicine (and play rugby), but frankly found the classes there rather boring after one term.

I realised I’d gone down the wrong path for me. I wasn’t pursuing my passion. I grew up on the island of Jersey where a myriad of marine creatures would be exposed during very low tides. They fascinated me. One day my elementary teacher brought in a microscope from mainland England and we spent hours with our eyes glued to it, staring at creatures swimming in pond water. That fascination and excitement with natural science couldn’t be matched.

After some reflection, I recalled how much I had enjoyed interviewing with Bristol’s Biochemistry department during campus visits. I contacted the department and entered the following autumn and found it to be absolutely the best place for me – a rigorous curriculum combined with a sense of belonging to an academic family.

I loved it so much, and I am proud to be a “triple” alum. Bristol taught me rigor and discipline in science. Professors like Nigel Brown, Owen Jones and my PhD advisor Trevor Griffiths demanded independent thought (and hard work). But they also valued collaboration and collegiality. These principles have stuck with me throughout my career – how to aggressively pursue the truth, while not taking yourself too seriously.

In terms of opportunity, the USA has a science economy like no other and I was keen to explore new horizons. Over the last 25 years, we have generated a deep knowledge base of how circadian clocks are built and function in a variety of organisms. California remains a hotbed of innovation and a fantastic place to translate our knowledge into products that provide some benefit to mankind. In the case of agriculture, this can be crops that are more resistant to stresses due to climate change. In humans, there is the real possibility of developing drugs that target the clockworks to treat diseases like diabetes and cancer.

If I could give one word of advice to students today it would be to constantly seek out people smarter than yourself to work with. That translated into some wonderful discoveries in my own field, such as identifying many of the key clock genes in plants and humans, that are now relevant to advances in either agriculture or medicine.

I am incredibly grateful to the University for the training and scholarship I received while there, and the memories: walking across the downs in all kinds of weather from Wills Hall to classes every day, (Southern California can make you soft!), picking up cider (“scrumpy”) from our own “Department of Pomology” at the Long Ashton Research station on a Friday afternoon, and meeting the Oxford Dangerous Sports club at a party in Clifton the night before they did the world’s first bungee jump in 1979!

It reminds me that it pays to take a leap into the unknown, to embrace the wrong turns, dust yourself off and get right back in there. Bristol continues to dare to be different, and I very much enjoy staying involved with the University as chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for BrisSynBio, a world class synthetic biology centre. A good piece of both my heart and brain will always be at the University of Bristol and the wonderful city. Like me, it too is looking for something new, something that nobody else has seen or done before, and that’s an exciting place to be.

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Professor Steve A. Kay (BSc 1981, PhD 1985, Hon DSc 2014) is Director of Convergent Biosciences and Provost Professor of Neurology, Biomedical Engineering and Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California. As one of the world’s top experts on genes and circadian rhythms, he has published more than 200 papers and is named by Thomson-Reuters as a highly cited scientist. He has been cited in Science magazine’s “Breakthroughs of the Year” three times since 1997, and has received numerous awards, including election to the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. Kay has served on the advisory boards to Althea, Bayer AG, Monsanto, Novartis, Toyota Motor Corp and BP, amongst others.

As part of the ‘Made in Bristol’ interview series, alumna Laura Trevelyan takes us through her journey from Bristol to BBC World News America Anchor.

When I think of Bristol, I remember the suspension bridge, drinking coffee with my friends, cramming in the library, and halcyon early summer city days after final exams. I loved Bristol from the moment I set foot in Clifton as a sixth form student and was thrilled to be offered a place to read English. However, the Beowulf curriculum did not agree with me and I was soon beating down the door of the Politics Dept asking to transfer!

Dr Donald Shell kindly listened to my tale of woe, told me it was very unusual for students to transfer out of the English Dept, but he was sure something could be done. And indeed it was. Donald and Prof Mark Wickham-Jones were inspiring and engaging tutors who widened my horizons. In our final year, politics students participated in a role play exercise in which we played negotiators representing different countries in a global crisis. The scenario was realistic – conflict in the Middle East. I was a Norwegian peace maker, and we had tremendously good fun throwing ourselves into the different characters! It taught me so much about diplomacy and how personalities can affect delicate situations.

The most memorable part of my time at Bristol was going solo in a bulldog aircraft at Filton airfield, where I was in the Bristol University Air Squadron. The feeling of freedom was exhilarating, and my instructors were so welcoming. I was one of a batch of the first women to be admitted to BUAS as an experiment to see how women would do should they be admitted as pilots. The experiment was a success and women now fly fast jets in the RAF! I was the first to go solo in my class, since I was reading English and everyone else was an aeronautical engineer.

My passion for journalism came from a voracious interest in what’s going on in the world and why. I wrote for the student magazine Waysgoose at Bristol and applying to Cardiff University’s postgraduate diploma in journalism seemed like an obvious step. In 2004, I moved to the USA with my family and I covered the USA elections for the BBC as the United Nations correspondent. We loved the energy, excitement and broad canvas the US offered us, so we stayed.

The biggest challenge of my life was finding a work/life balance. It is a constant juggling act, and when my boys were little I was always exhausted and never felt there was enough time to do anything. Now they’re bigger, I have to wait up until they get home and I’m still tired! Every stage of being a parent presents different challenges. But if you want to have children and a career, there’s never a good time to have a baby. It’s always inconvenient!

It’s been a privilege to work for the BBC for half my life and becoming a US citizen was a highly significant event for me too. The Americans started the revolutionary war-crying for no taxation without representation – and as a non-citizen I felt strongly about this too! Our youngest son was born in the US, our two older boys were raised here, and we felt committed to our new home, which had welcomed us with open arms and given us so much opportunity. I was sworn in the day after Donald Trump’s election, with people from all four corners of the world, and it was a very emotional occasion. Britain and Bristol gave me roots, and America gave me wings.