Dr Jess Power

Dr Jess Power received her BSc from De Montfort University, MA from Nottingham Trent whilst employed in the apparel sector, and PhD in Technical Textiles from UMIST. She joined the University of Huddersfield in 2012 as Director of T&L in the School of Art, Design and Architecture and currently holds the title of Reader in Textiles and Apparel. Jess was awarded her FTI CText from the Textile Institute in 2010 for her major personal creative contribution to T&L within the creative sector and has been a member of the professional bodies council since 2011. In 2014 she was awarded Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy for sustained excellence within T&L practice. Jess has been involved in, and managed a variety of internally and externally funded projects. Recently she has been leading two externally funded projects 'ICE' and 'Honeypot' whilst completing a MBA. Impact of work Jess believes that excellence in teaching should be embedded into daily practice and that it should be all encompassing, drawing together a diverse range of knowledge, skills, abilities and attributes. Her focus on interdisciplinarity has enabled her to transform the student experience by creating networks for students, staff and the commercial sector, who share common goals of transferring knowledge beyond the boundaries of their own disciplines, whilst developing employability and enterprising skills. This has led to externally published case studies with HEA, ETC and Experiential Entrepreneurship Exercises Journal, and industry facing interdisciplinary student challenges. Plans for the future Dr Jess Power has a particular interest in embedding interdisciplinary opportunities into HE. Her ambition is to transform the student experience by bringing together students and staff who share the common goal of co-creating knowledge. Her recent research consolidated five-general frameworks from across the sector into a best-practice model. It is the intention to further develop this model, exploring three further areas: joint industry challenges, discipline-hopping interns, staff placements. Her plans for the future are to extend this concept to other universities both nationally and internationally through investigating methodologies to develop new epistemologies and to assess their impact on the learning.