The Rabin Ezra Scholarship Trust

The Rabin Ezra Scholarship Trust has been set up with the purpose of making available bursaries for post-graduate students. Dr Rabin Ezra was an undergraduate at Queen Mary and Westfield College in the late 1980s and then went on to obtain his PhD in 1994 in the Department of Computer Science. He specialised in computer graphics, and continued to an eminently successful career at Canon Research Europe, Criterion Software and finally Sony Computer Entertainment Europe in London. Rabin passed away on Monday, June 27th 2005 while he was in Malta on company business, after having been taken ill with pneumonia.

His family have established a Trust Fund that is to be used in perpetuity for the provision of bursaries to postgraduate students. Each year a Selection Committee comprised of a number of Rabin’s colleagues, friends and family will select one or more recipients for a bursary. This trust fund is available for students at Queen Mary, University of London, University College London, and Imperial College – the three institutions in London with which Rabin had the closest ties.

The trust made bursaries available for the first time in January 2007 and these are available annually thereafter. The bursaries will be made with the intention of recognising and rewarding promising junior research students.

Initially the trust has about £10,000 per annum to distribute. The Selection Committee has discretion to set the amount of the individual bursaries. It may distribute the money to more than one student and it may withhold funding if no suitable candidates present themselves. A recipient in one year may apply for subsequent years but there is no guarantee of a repeat award being made. The bursary is made without constraints on what the applicant might spend it on.

Application details will be posted when applications open once more in Sept/Oct 2024. Please send Adobe Acrobat PDF files only, since no others will be considered.

An application should comprise three pages only:

• One page summary of CV including academic history to date.
• One page summary of current research, research plans and statement of how the bursary would benefit the applicant achieve these plans.
• One page containing contact details for:
  1. One personal referee
  2. One academic referee
  3. Current supervisor
  4. Head of department

No correspondence will be entered in to concerning the reasons for accepting or rejecting particular applications.

Short-listed applicants will be invited to interview. The interview, which will last no more than 45 minutes, will concern the applicant’s ambitions in research. The applicant may give a presentation of five minutes duration if they wish.