Dec 5 2008
Young scientists with the potential to make the next generation of world-changing breakthroughs will have their talents nurtured by five new Centres for Doctoral Training at Imperial College London, thanks to a funding injection of over £18 million announced today.
The funding is part of a larger £250 million award from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) announced by Minister of State for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, today, which will fund 44 Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) and create over 2,000 PhD studentships at universities across the UK over five years.
Unlike traditional PhD programmes, CDTs enable PhD students to work with, and learn from, scientists across a variety of fields. This aims to produce a new generation of researchers with the interdisciplinary skills and expertise to help them tackle some of the major challenges facing the world today.
Sir Roy Anderson, Rector of Imperial College, welcomed the award, saying: "Providing excellent and exciting research training for our future scientists and engineers is central to Imperial's mission and of vital importance to the UK. These new training centres will ensure that the College continues to produce innovative young researchers who have the breadth of interdisciplinary experience needed to meet the global demand for highly trained specialist scientists and engineers."
Three of Imperial's new CDTs will be led by the College’s Department of Physics and will focus on:
• plastic electronic materials
• materials theory and simulation
• controlled quantum dynamics.
The two additional centres will be led by other institutions, in collaboration with Imperial. They have both been designated 'industrial doctorate training centres' by the EPSRC.
The first one, led by Cranfield University, aims to produce the next-generation of engineering leaders for the UK water sector, in collaboration with Imperial's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the universities of Sheffield, Exeter and Newcastle. Students will benefit from working closely with partners from the UK water industry throughout their doctoral training.
The second one, led by the University of Manchester, will focus on nuclear engineering and is a continuation of the successful Nuclear Engineering Doctorate programme, which is led by the University of Manchester in partnership with Imperial College London and supported by four other universities.
Imperial's CDT in the science and application of plastic electronic materials will be run in collaboration with the School of Engineering and Materials Science at Queen Mary, University of London.
Plastic electronics research is based on developing semiconductors, on which the whole electronics industry is based, from organic materials such as polymers, instead of inorganic materials like silicon. Plastic electronics has the potential to facilitate a wide range of technological developments in the future, from flexible electronic devices and low-cost, efficient solar cells, to energy efficient light sources, sensors and displays.
Imperial's CDT in the theory and simulation of materials will support researchers to develop the skills for understanding and modelling the properties of advanced materials, from the very small scale of individual atoms and their chemical bonds, up to the very large scale of structures such as aircraft wings, wind turbine blades, and buildings.
Imperial's CDT in controlled quantum dynamics will focus on the scientific and technological developments necessary to control and manipulate small numbers of atom-sized components with high levels of precision. This is vital for developing the next generation of information processing devices which are the size of only a few atoms.
The addition of these five new Centres at Imperial brings the total number at the College up to six. The College's Chemical Biology Centre Doctoral Training Centre was set up in 2003 and in 2007 received a renewal of its funding from the EPSRC for another five years.