Rob Shaw Placement Student of the Year Award 2024
By mh56@staff.staffs.ac.uk,
We were delighted recently to award our Rob Shaw Placement Student of the Year award to Teodosia Krumova for 2024 and grateful that Alex Blackett and Peter Hunter took time out of busy schedules to join us and say a few words on the award.
The 2024 placements saw some very worthwhile projects carried out. Visiting Professor Sarah Fieldhouse suggested a project looking at Latent Finger-marks on Mobile Phones using long wave UV lighting.
Teddy applied for and was selected to carry out this project and was supervised by Andrew Hawkins from the Police’s Forensic Enhancement Laboratory.
She was described as a particularly enthusiastic student who fully embraced the opportunity and was also especially keen to use her time as a learning experience. She was described as determined and willing to learn especially where her knowledge fell short in some areas.
Teddy’s report was very well written and despite the project not going to plan initially she showed an adaptability to her approach and delivered some good results.
The project has given the police the option to include reflective longwave UV as a non-destructive, additional, preliminary step, prior to/instead of the chemical treatment of mobile phones. This is predominantly important where devices are attributed to an injured party and requiring evidence without the chemically destructive process. Thus, enabling phones to be returned to their owner unaffected.
An academic overview of her work noted that as expected Teddy was an enthusiastic participant in her project. Whist it suggested improvements in some of the background detail to her work it noted the evident benefit in this work to the police.
The voting panel were unanimous from a very strong field that the 2024 Rob Shaw Placement Student of the Year Award went to Teddy Krumova.
Teddy thanked the police, the partnership and the University for the opportunity in undertaking the placement and said ‘I’m truly honoured to be chosen. It means a great deal to me, especially knowing the significance of the award and the legacy it represents’
Congratulations to Teddy from all involved in the partnership.
A bit of a back drop to the award:
The Rob Shaw award was first presented in 2022 (for placements in 2021) following the untimely death of our friend and colleague Rob Shaw, who as a lecturer in the Computing Department at the University of Staffordshire was a leading member of the Staffordshire Forensic Partnership.
The award was created by skilful ceramicists at the University who worked to a brief that was to create an award that would reflect Rob’s life in terms of being a son of the Potteries and someone passionate about forensics. A bottle kiln, once synonymous with Stoke-on-Trent along with binary code and the double helix captures that perfectly in our view. The binary code when translated says ‘Rob Shaw’