AESOP Excellence Award for teaching and research programme
12th August 2011
Dr Abid Mehmood, Research Fellow at Sustainable Places Research Institute has recently returned from KU Leuven in Belgium, where he was lucky enough to be part of an award winning teaching and research programme.
The programme is the result of European universities coming together to deliver an interdisciplinary doctoral training programme at KU Leuven, and has been recently awarded Excellence in Teaching Prize 2011 by the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP).
Abid, who has been closely involved with the design and teaching of the programme, said: “It has been a real privilege to be involved with the delivery of this and I’m pleased that the hard work of everyone involved has been recognised through the award of this prize.”
In selecting the winning programme the jury commented on “the strong and sustained collaboration of a range of university partners in order to offer an interdisciplinary postgraduate training course in urban, regional and spatial planning.”
The programme is headed by Professor Frank Moulaert at ASRO, Faculty of Engineering, KU Leuven, and has come a long way as a teaching and research programme since its beginning in University of Lille 1 in the 1990s, and then Newcastle University in the years 2003 to 2010. It is a collective approach, characterised by the integration and ethical commitment of the various European universities. The three-month residential course runs between March and May each year, and comprises a mix of research, teaching and practice activities. It attracts a select group of postgraduate/early career researchers, academics, and practitioners from around the world, and in 2011 saw attendees from Belgium, China, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine and the UK.
Cardiff University School of Social Sciences has a bilateral agreement with KU Leuven for the exchange of staff and students.