Dr Rachel Salzano

Congratulations to Dr Rachel Salzano, who starts the new academic year 2024/5 with a permanent contract as a lecturer in the Applied Informatics subject group of the School of Computing, Engineering, and the Built Environment at Edinburgh Napier University.

Rachel initially took up a fixed-term post within the Group soon after completing her PhD on public libraries, forced migrants, and culture, which I supervised from 2019 within the Centre for Social Informatics alongside Dr David Brazier and Dr Gemma Webster (now a lecturer at Dundee University). It is great news that Rachel‘s contract is now open-ended.

Rachel‘s teaching this year is primarily centred on research methods for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, and classes on security audit and compliance for postgraduates only. She also provides support on modules of the Information Science MSc programme offered by the School. Alongside her classroom teaching, Rachel supervises students who are working on their final year honours projects and masters dissertations, and is hoping soon to recruit a self-funded PhD student to explore research literacy and information practices.

Rachel‘s own research interests include extension of themes covered in her PhD thesis, the auditory environments of public libraries, and the influence of food practices on the development and maintenance of stories in different cultures.

Rachel is the recruitment lead for the Applied Informatics subject group. In this role she contributes to the running of events – both on and off-campus – for prospective students, and developing teaching and research partnerships with other universities. She is also involved in the 2026 iConference, to be hosted by Napier in spring next year, as one of the chairs of its student symposium.

Whereas Rachel is at the start of her academic career, two of my long-standing colleagues – Dr Peter Cruickshank and Dr David Haynes – have just taken retirement from employment at Edinburgh Napier University.

I have known Peter Cruickshank since he joined Napier as a Research Fellow in 2004. In his 21 years at the University Peter added two more degrees to his list of qualifications, moved into teaching and research roles, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021, the same year that he was awarded his PhD. As can be seen from my own publication lists, Peter and I have collaborated on numerous projects, papers and reports together over the years. The most used tags on this blog are also testament to the amount of work that we have completed jointly.

I first met David Haynes the 1990s when he was working in information consultancy roles, and I was a lecturer at Queen Margaret College (now University). I got to know him more when he joined as a PhD student member of the cadre of AHRC-funded LIS-DREaM project, which I ran in 2011/12. Dr Laura Muir (who retired in 2020) and I were delighted when David accepted the offer of a lecturer position within our group in 2019, and officially joined us in January 2020. David’s enthusiasm for the work of the Centre for Social informatics was obvious from even before he took up his post with us: he spoke to us about his postdoc fellowship at a research seminar in August 2019, and he came to Edinburgh for our end of year ‘all centre’ meeting on 18th December that year.

Due to holiday commitments, I was unable to attend the retirement party for Peter and David in August. However, I was pleased to meet them both for lunch last Friday 3rd October, and to hear about their first few weeks of new-found freedom. From our conversation it sounds like they have both taken well to retirement with much discussion of exercise (mainly running), projects (e.g. Peter has created a new study for himself at home), and travel (e.g. David has been inter-railing in Europe already). They are also both involved in a few writing projects, the majority with some of our former colleagues.

New retirees: Dr David Haynes and Dr Peter Cruickshank