The Queen's College Record 2020

in Japan will also be postponed to next year, as is the
World Seabird Conference at which I was invited to talk.
Nonetheless, the 2019-2020 academic year has been
a busy one. I had the pleasure to give guest seminars
at Bristol and Cambridge University, where I met new
colleagues and even started a few new collaborations,
including with a mathematical biologist, a new field
for me but one which I have enjoyed exploring. I also
became secretary of The Seabird Group, a UK-based
charity promoting seabird science and conservation.
Reports and College Activities
This was also a fruitful year for publications (details of which can be found at
annettefayet.com), including one reporting a new tool use behaviour in puffins,
which was a fun collaboration with a primatologist and attracted a lot of media
interest (google ‘scratching puffin’ to find out more!). But my greatest satisfaction
was to finish writing an important paper about a key project of my Junior Research
Fellowship, aiming to uncover the causes of puffin population declines in the northeast
Atlantic, which will hopefully be published next year. Finally, a proposal led by BirdLife
International for a new Marine Protected Area for seabirds in the North Atlantic, in
which some of my data on puffin migration were used, was accepted this spring
(official announcement postponed to 2021), and it is a real reward to see my work
having a real-world impact on conservation policy.
I gave a boost to my outreach skills by attending two Science Communication
‘Bootcamps’ organised by National Geographic in Munich and London, where I was
taught how to improve my public speaking and received social media training at the
London headquarters of Facebook, Twitter and Google, no less. I put the skills to
good use by taking part in a National Geographic Explorer Classroom at the beginning
of the lockdown, sharing my experience as a seabird scientist in a live online session
with an audience of over 1000 children from all over the world. I’m also trying to be
more active on social media to share results of my research and raise awareness of
seabirds’ plight – you can find me on Twitter and Instagram @AnnetteFayet.
Anthony Gardner (Fine Art)
This has been my last year as Head of the Ruskin
School of Art, the University’s fine art department,
and what a year to end on! It began with a residency
in Beijing in August and a keynote presentation for
the Setouchi Asian Art Forum in Japan’s inland sea
region, followed by a series of talks in Hungary and the
UK and another keynote at UCL to celebrate the 30 th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (the subject of
my 2015 book, Politically Unbecoming). I then delivered lectures at the University
College Record 2020 | The Queen’s College 17