Dr Rehan Shah (SEMS) has been selected as a Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) Engagement Champion by the Centre for Public Engagement (CPE) for his lead role on a QMUL-CPE funded community engagement project in 2024 titled 'Locating communities in community-based learning: empowering local community groups in university-community partnerships', which sparked off interdisciplinary academic and community partner engagement across the wider QMUL community through a cross-faculty collaboration with Dr David Geiringer from the School of History.

The workshop at QMUL engaged multiple community partners which colleagues were able to interact with. Dr Jae-Hwan Park was able to gain several community partner contacts and valuable insights, to incorporate in the School’s newly established MSc Engineering Management programme.

Dr Shah was also able to disseminate the findings from the workshop with one of the community partners from the Brunel Musuem (who had attended the workshop) at the national UK&I Higher Education Institutional Research Conference (HEIR) in Sept 2024 at Buckinghamshire New University.

Dr Shah and Dr Geiringer presented a poster from the QMUL Festival of Education in March 2024, which was very well received by colleagues from the Queen Mary Academy. Dr Shah and Dr Geiringer’s blog post was the first to be featured on the reinstated CPE’s Engagement Blog website and remains a unique example of impactful interdisciplinary collaboration between the humanities and sciences. As a result, Dr Shah was also invited to share his insights and contributions from his work and represent QMUL to be filmed as part of the community engagment learning toolkit being developed by the University of Westminster in Nov 2024. He also invited the community partner from the Brunel Musuem to join him for this to involve wider engagement and involvement of community organisations.

In a similar vein, Dr Shah was also appointed as a member of the London Branch Committee and the Early Career Mathematicians Committee of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications due to his pioneering contributions and insights into shaping applied mathematics and mathematics education research by providing a voice for younger mathematicians at policy level.