Celebrating 10 years of the SMI

As we celebrate our 10th anniversary, we're looking back on the ways we have established ourselves as innovators in methodological research and training. Over the past decade, the SMI has built engaging research, innovative teaching, and strong collaborations.

To celebrate this milestone, we’ve picked 10 things to showcase the breadth of our work and the achievements we’ve seen over the years! We'll have a new achievement to share each day.

1: The SMI Student Conference 

Each year, students, staff, external partners and alumni have come together for the Student Conference. The event provides a great opportunity for everyone to learn from one another, particularly from the final year students who have a chance to present their dissertation work. 

Students can also learn first-hand from fellow students’ placement experiences, as well as from key employers - furthering their application of knowledge in real world settings.  

With so much to see and hear, our annual student conference is just one example of how our undergraduate degree programmes bring our community together to share and learn from each other. 

2: Our award-winning staff

Over the 10 years of the SMI, we’ve been joined by so many wonderful members of staff. 

Whether it’s our academic, research and teaching staff, or our professional services staff providing key support to our whole community, we’re proud of the achievements and recognition they’ve received. 

Here are some of the awards our staff have received….

Laura Towers - Researcher Development, Outstanding Thesis Mentoring Award, 2024 

Andy Bell - Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology Editors choice award, 2023; Momentum Quarterly Best Paper award 2022; Housing Studies Association Valerie Karn Prize, 2024

Kitty Nichols - TUoS Education Awards, Personal and Academic Tutoring, 2024; Inspirational Woman 

Kerry Swain - Inspirational Woman 

Ella Whiteley - Excellence in Education Award, London School of Economics, 2022

Aneta Piekut - SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence 2017; Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research) Fellow 2020-21

Lauren White - ESRC Making Sense of Society Writing Award, 2017; Mildred Blaxter New Writer’s Prize, Sociology of Health and Illness, 2022; TUoS Education Awards, Student-staff Partnership and Co-production 

Kate Reed - ESRC Outstanding Societal impact prize 2019

Will Mason - 'Masters Teacher of the Year' winner in the Postgrad Awards 2021; TUoS Education Awards, Student-staff Partnership and Co-production in Education 2024

3: Research impact

Researchers from the SMI have brought new discoveries, viewpoints and ideas to light, with far-reaching impact in our community and beyond. 

From understanding food poverty to the impact of lowering the voting age, we aim to tackle the big social sciences challenges and real-world issues. 

Watch this video to find out more about our real-world impact. 

4: Graduate numbers 

We've seen our community grow throughout the years, and we're always proud to share in the excitement of our students graduating. 

Across our degrees, we've been able to equip students with qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods research skills.

5: SMI partnerships

Our work focuses on the challenges facing today’s society, the methods necessary to tackle them, and the ways we can apply this knowledge in real-world contexts - and it’s our partnerships and knowledge exchange that have allowed us to achieve this. 

From our SMI Advisory Board to our annual Partnerships Day, we pride ourselves on collaboration. 

We work with those committed to social change and at the forefront of policy. Our CiviAct project allowed Dr Will Mason to respond to the enduring social, economic and justice inequalities experienced by minoritised children and young people through a coalition of community-led organisations in Sheffield and Manchester.

For Dr Aneta Piekut, working alongside colleagues from across the university and within the local area led to ‘Blurring the Edges in Rotherham’, a film highlighting how research and art can change perceptions, and bring residents together to think about the future.

7: PPE

In 2021 we launched our brand new Politics, Philosophy and Economics degrees. 

Designed for future leaders and policymakers, with a focus on innovation and behavioural public policy, our students tackle pressing social science challenges facing society today - including productivity, inequality, and security threats.

The programmes have a unique cross-disciplinary core to help students answer the big questions and understand behaviour change. Values, resource constraint and pressure politics are at the heart of our curricula. Students experience analytic methods from the very first term, giving them the skills to ‘see inside data’ to answer urgent social and economic questions.  

Our first graduates completed in summer 2024 and are heading out into the world with a wide range of employment and further study destinations in the UK and beyond.

Hear more from SMI student Rikzar about her experience studying PPE.

8: Graduate destinations 

Our first graduates completed in summer 2024 and are heading out into the world with a wide range of employment and further study destinations in the UK and beyond.

Our graduates have gone on to find roles in: 

• The Civil Service 
• The National Centre for Social Research 
• Sheffield City Council
• The Office for National Statistics
• The Good Things Foundation 
• And more!! 

9: F1 Greatest Driver 

Our research spans a wide range of topics - and even makes it as far as Formula 1. 

Dr Andy Bell used statistical analysis to discover who the sport’s most accomplished competitor is – looking at who is the best driver because of their talent, rather than because they have the best car.

We used innovative statistical methods to separate the effects of driver and car in Formula 1, to consider, net of team effects, who was the greatest formula 1 driver of all time. We found that Argentinian Juan Manuel Fangio was the greatest of all time. The research captured the imagination of F1 fans, featuring in a number of news outlets and in a Netflix documentary about Fangio, released in 2020.

Without considering the impact of his team, the greatest driver of all time in terms of most race wins is Michael Schumacher. But Andy’s study found that once the effect of his team is removed, Fangio claims the top spot, followed by Alain Prost in second and Fernando Alonso in third position.

“A similar model could be used to answer a variety of questions in society – for example, how much do individuals, teams and companies affect worker productivity or how much classes, schools and neighbourhoods affect educational attainment."

Read more here.

10: Why numbers matter: How tall is tall?

One of the big focuses in the SMI has always been making quantitative data accessible and interpretable, and this wasn’t something limited to our taught programmes. In the Why Numbers Matter YouTube series, we presented examples of the importance of the presentation of data in fun short animated videos, with some receiving tens of thousands of views.

The series of short videos explores different statistical concepts that we may encounter in our everyday lives.

For example - what does being tall really mean?  In this video from the series, we use the example of heights to explain the idea of relativity and context. If you're an NBA basketball player, for example, being 6 feet tall (1.83m) is not really tall at all!

Watch How Tall is Tall? or find others in the series here.