Edinburgh Law School marks teaching-led research at annual Celebration Day
Fri 19 June 2026
Edinburgh Law School’s annual Research and Impact Celebration took place on Tuesday 16 June 2026. The event provides a wonderful opportunity for the Law School to come together as a community and to showcase and celebrate the breath of its research and impact activities. This year's event focused on celebrating the intimate connection between teaching and research and, in particular, teaching-led, teaching-informed and teaching-based research. The aim was to explore teaching as a hugely reflective, creative and generative process and the ways in which teaching and assessment can underpin, support, nurture and transform our research and enhance our research and communication skills.
The event included two panel discussions: the first saw Professor Alexandra Braun, Dr Stephen Coutts and Dr Alistair Henry discuss ways in which teaching at all levels develops us as thinkers and scholars. The second panel discussion focussed on teaching as a way to enhance public engagement, build networks and produce data that will in turn benefit our research, with Dr Amy Lawton, Dr Rozemarijn Roland Holst and Professor Burkhard Schafer sharing thoughts on this topic.
A highlight of this annual event is always our PhD research presentations. Our second year PhD students each presented either a poster or a three-minute thesis (3MT), challenging them to present their research in a concise and accessible way. It was an excellent display of the diverse range of PhD projects underway in the School and we were delighted to see how well the students were encouraging and supporting each other. Congratulations to Juan Pablo Andrade Rojas and Beth Lee-Shield for winning the 3MT and Poster prizes respectively, and to Amrita Krishnakumar, Emma Dhondt, Sasha Smit and Yichen Xiang as the runners up.
The event also marked the retirement of two valued colleagues, Professor Neil Walker, who first taught public law at the School between 1986-1996, and after a spending time at the University of Aberdeen and the EUI in Florence, joined the School in 2008 as Regius Professor of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations, and Professor Stephen Neff, Professor of War and Peace, who had been with the School for over 40 years.
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