On Wednesday 2 July 2025, three UM academics, namely Prof. Peter Borg from the Department of Mathematics, Dr Anne Marie Bezzina Busuttil from the Department of French and Dr Lisa Pace from the Edward de Bono Institute for Creative Thinking, met UM Rector Prof. Alfred J. Vella in order to celebrate another milestone. Pro-Rector for Strategic Planning & Sustainability, Prof. Valerie Sollars, UM's SEA-EU Rector's Delegate, Prof. Alan Deidun, Administrative Director, Dr Christian Bonnici, and the SEA-EU Office, were also present.
The three academics are the latest awardees of the University of Malta SEA-EU Research Seed Fund. They gave a short presentation about their interesting projects and related the topics to 'real-life' application, highlighting their importance to not only research but also society.
Earlier this year, a call for applications was issued asking for international research collaboration projects to be submitted, including at least one partner from another SEA-EU university.
The title of Dr Pace's project is 'POSEIDON - Exploring Pathways tOward Sustainable ocEan futures: tensIons, traDe-offs, and just transitiONs'. It aims to explore sustainability futures as strategic courses of action or pathways adopted by various actors to transition from present conditions towards preferred future visions or clearly defined objectives.
Dr Bezzina Busuttil' project is 'A Comparative Discourse Analysis of Online Reactions to Articles on Environmental Issues in Maltese and French Media'. This study aims to analyse public discourse on environmental issues in Maltese and French online media by constructing and examining a bilingual corpus of readers' reactions.
Prof. Borg's project is the 'Domination and Isolation of Graphs'. Graph theory is the mathematics of relations and connections and Domination theory is the popular study of dominating sets. In 2017, Yair Caro and Adriana Hansberg widened it to the study of isolating sets. Given a set F of graphs, S is called an F isolating set of G if N[S] intersects the vertex set of each subgraph of G that is a copy of a member of F. The isolation problem is to determine how small an F-isolating set can be.
Some doctoral students and associated researchers also joined the ceremony both in person and online, including SEA-EU Universities:
- For Prof. Borg these were: Hanna Furma艅czyk from University of Gda艅sk, Magda Dettlaff from University of Gda艅sk, Doctoral Students Dayle Scicluna and Karl Bartolo
- For Dr Anne Marie Bezzina Busuttil: Liana Ermakova from Universit茅 de Bretagne Occidentale at Brest
- For Dr Lisa Pace: Hugo Pinto from University of Algarve
