Citations for May Hicks Awards 2011
Rutger Alberink
The winner is Rutger Alberink from Strathclyde University. Rutger is £1000 better off as a result of his award. His dissertation is titled "Accident Modelling in the Railway Industry: A Railway Station Performance Measure on Passenger Slips, Trips and Falls" and was undertaken for RSSB, an independent, non-profit organisation whose purpose is to play a central role in supporting and facilitating industry-wide knowledge development and sharing a broad range of subject areas to improve the overall level of safety in the rail industry.
Rutger presented his work to a selection of RSSB Safety, Knowledge and Planning and National Programmes departments, which has led to consideration of the techniques that Rutger applied being adopted to other safety risk related problems. The research created a learning opportunity for both RSSB, in terms of a process, as well as industry, in terms of results. It has allowed RSSB to continue to demonstrate its commitment to novel developments in risk evaluation approaches.
RSSB presented Rutger’s work to the Station Safety Improvement Sub-group, an industry team made up of station operator representatives with a specific interest in managing and reducing risk at stations. Rutger’s work was received very well. It has created a healthy debate and industry appetite for further application of the ranking system. Work is now in progress with a volunteer operator to further validate Rutger’s ranking system and explore how it can be adapted to incorporate other station specific features and risk areas such as anti-social behaviours.
Strathclyde’s internal examiner said, "This is an outstanding dissertation. The student has been remarkably thorough in his investigation of the data. He has chosen his methods well for analyzing the data and integrated different approaches in a sound manner. Not only is the quality of the technical work is high, but the exposition of the analysis and the synthesis of the specific situation with the general literature is excellent. There is evidence of extensive reading and consideration of the issues arising. There is creativity in the selection and adaptation of methods used for data analysis and good awareness of the need to communicate findings to client. The written dissertation is a beautiful balance of depth in detail with appropriate breadth of accessibility. The reflections are mature and insightful."
The runners-up are Elizabeth Rowse (Cardiff University) and David Brailsford (Lancaster University), both of whom received cheques for £250. Elizabeth’s project was undertaken for the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board to investigate the optimum skill-mix of district nurse teams to address patient demand at minimum cost. David, meanwhile, assessed the impact of customer satisfaction on consumer behaviour for analytical model building in Marketing Analytics and Data Mining at insurance services provider, AXA Winterthur.
There is no longer a separate undergraduate prize, but entries are still encouraged. Claire Wilson, also from Strathclyde, was the only such entry this year, and despite it not winning one of the main prizes, we decided to commend the project and award a prize of £100. Claire investigated the impact of relocating manufacturing capability for the UK arm of a multinational hard landscaping Company.
