Our great students ...

I'm biased ... but I absolutely love my job ... and some of the best things about it is when we see excellence thriving, either from the great SMEs who we work with or when our students win awards  ... and Charley is one of the best we've ever had. This week he picked up the Edinburgh Napier University Student of the Year for 2015:

And to show how great it can be to be identified as the best around:

It is not only great for us but for his family too, who come all the way from France to see him getting his award. Remember that it is "the best student out of 10s of thousands of our students" ... that's how good he is:

and, of course, he makes Richard (Macfarlane) and I look academically good too:

Always our aim is to try and attract some of the best students towards a career in research, and we've managed to get Charley signed up for a PhD.

So I'm so privileged as a Professor to see excellence, and we aim to spot the best and help support it. For Charley, he took on other universities in a cipher challenge, and came out on top:

So where does it go?

Well, our great students go onto great things. Here's Dr Jamie Graves, who won at the Student & Alumni Achievement Awards in 2011, and who has since become a role model in driving forward Zonefox [here]:

Conclusion

In The Cyber Academy we aim to work with others and develop excellence in whatever form it takes, and our students are our best assets that we have ... and we aim to push them towards being leaders in their field.  Charley is a product of our innovative MSc in Advanced Security and Digital Forensics, and has shown that he has the potential to be world-leading, and our focus in the next few years is to allow that to happen.

As we head out ... into the snow ... up to Inverness for the IET Christmas lectures [here], we'll have a warm glow to keep the cold out! It really has been an amazing year, and next year will only get better. Be part of it ...