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Product category: Engineering Industry Developments and Awards
News Release from: Royal Academy of Engineering
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial Team on 19 February 2007

Academy supports research student
development

Five PhD students have won prestigious new Research Student Development Awards from the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Five PhD students have won prestigious new Research Student Development Awards from the Royal Academy of Engineering Michael Aspinall, Frances Baxter, Bryony Davidson, Bryan Horton and Iain Roberts will each receive a GBP 5000 grant for personal development projects to broaden their training

Michael Aspinall of Lancaster University works on the Distinguish Project, a homeland security collaboration between Lancaster, Manchester and Liverpool Universities to detect concealed explosives.

The consortium aims to build a system that enables efficient screening of goods in transit, both domestic baggage and international cargo.

Using nuclear engineering research suspect items will be exposed to a beam of pulsed neutrons.

This will cause the item to emit gamma radiation, which will reveal what elements are inside and whether they are explosive.

The academy's award, one of five given this year for the first time, will enable Aspinall to attend relevant conferences and present the latest results of his work.

He hopes to represent Great Britain in the 2012 Olympic Marathon.

Aspinall is currently ranked 17th nationally for the Marathon and ran the fastest UK 20 miles time last year.

In March he will spend two weeks at one of Kenya's high altitude training camps to boost his athletic performance before his next series of races.

While in Kenya he will also do voluntary work with local communities.

"Michael is a most exceptional character and one of the best research students I have encountered in ten years", says his PhD supervisor Dr Malcolm Joyce, who leads the Distinguish consortium.

"He has quickly become a significant force in our high-profile project - and still finds time to run 90 miles a week".

"Somehow he combines these diverse interests and excels at both".

"Managing a full-time PhD is complex and demands a lot of planning", says Aspinall.

"Mix a full-time PhD with a high intensity training programme, consisting of twice-a-day training, and you have an arduous challenge".

"I thrive off challenges and love being busy".

"I wouldn't want it any other way, though I do dream of being a full-time athlete".

"I feel studying and training complement each other perfectly".

"You need that 'escape' time".

"When I've had a hard day in the office unwinding on a run is great".

"It works the other way too - sometimes all I want to do it sit down and read an academic paper".

Bath University's Frances Baxter is studying a range of ceramics with varying electrical properties that might be used as grafts to repair defects in bones.

Mimicking natural bone is complex as it has some "piezoelectric" properties - crystals within the bone generate a voltage when the bone is under stress, this effect may help to trigger bone growth.

The academy's award, one of five given this year for the first time, will enable Baxter to broaden her experience by attending international conferences, including the Orthopaedic Research Society conference in Hawaii in October.

She also hopes to spend time abroad working with collaborators in Lausanne and Pittsburgh and plans to learn Spanish this summer on a two-week immersion course in Spain - she is already fluent in French.

She also finds time to play violin in the Bath Symphony Orchestra and to sing in the university gospel choir.

"Frances has shown great versatility in the development of her practical skills and ability to work as part of a team", says her research supervisor Dr Irene Turner.

"She has the drive and enthusiasm to make the most of this award, which will help her to realise her vision of learning from the best international researchers in her field".

"The award will provide some fantastic opportunities for me as a research student", says Baxter".

"It will allow me to enhance my project through collaborations which would not have been possible without this funding".

"I am very excited about the possibilities that are now available to me".

Edinburgh University has won two awards.

Bryony Davidson is using noninvasive optical scanning to study live mouse egg cells.

The award will enable her to broaden her experience by spending time as a visiting researcher at the University of Michigan and the Babraham Institute in Cambridge.

It will also pay for her to take an intensive French course and to present her work at a conference in France in 2007 - the top gathering of European experts in imaging biological molecules.

"Bryony is an exceptionally gifted young woman and a credit to the School of Engineering and Electronics at Edinburgh", says Professor William Easson, Head of the Institute for Materials and Processes.

"The spells of work she plans as a visiting researcher in Cambridge and the US will give her excellent experience of research at two world-class institutions".

"The purpose of my research is to develop the use of Raman spectroscopy as a noninvasive technique to analyse the quality of oocytes (immature eggs)", says Davidson.

"This work is of value at a time when more people are pursuing assisted reproductive techniques".

"The nature of this topic means my work straddles the boundary between the physical and life sciences, an environment in which collaboration is especially important".

"Therefore, I am delighted that the academy has offered me this fantastic opportunity - it will enable me to visit leading research groups in the fields of epigenetics and spectroscopy, and to pursue activities that I hope will broaden my experience as a researcher".

At Aberdeen University Bryan Horton is developing a new kind of wave power system.

"Bryan, one of my best undergraduate students, has proved to be an excellent postgraduate researcher with a unique combination of practical and theoretical skills", says his research supervisor Professor Marian Wiercigroch, Head of Engineering at Aberdeen University.

"For the last year and half he has been working hard on a challenging multidisciplinary project to harvest the energy of sea waves using parametric pendula".

Horton will use his award to broaden his experience while doing his research, including a study visit to his collaborators in Rome and Ancona this summer and a course of Italian language lessons before he goes.

He has developed a mathematical model and just built a scale physical model of the wave-power generator and will start testing it on a shaking table soon and hopes to move on to testing it in a wave tank by the summer.

"I feel very privileged to receive this award from the academy", says Horton.

"The grant will be really useful and enable me to do some more practical things like learning a new language".

"My project involves a lot of mathematical modelling and I will now be able to incorporate more practical work to calibrate the predictions and attend the top international conferences".

Iain Roberts, also from Edinburgh University, is studying the mechanics of skeleton bobsleigh, at which he competes at international level.

Skeleton bobsleigh involves sliding head-first down an ice track at up to 140km/h on a steel sled steered by the slider shifting their weight.

"It all depends on weight transference and actual bending of the sled so the better you understand how the sled interacts with the ice and how your movements transfer through the sled to the track the better you can perform", says Roberts.

He started sliding three years ago and competes for New Zealand.

"Most sleds tend to be of a generic design".

"With medals won and lost by 0.01 seconds, a sled tailored to the individual could be the advantage that wins a gold medal".

"Iain is passionate about his sport and about applying engineering principles to improve his understanding of skeleton bobsleigh", says his research supervisor Dr Jane Blackford.

"His PhD is on the mechanics of skeleton bobsleigh and ice friction and involves instrumentation and data-logging to measure sled performance and ultimately build a new tailored sled".

The academy's award will enable him to broaden his experience while doing his research, including a study visit to the Ice Physics laboratory at Grenoble.

It will also pay for training to help him prepare an event for the Edinburgh Science Festival in 2008.

"This award from the Academy is fantastic", says Roberts.

"It has been a long, hard process to get this project off the ground".

"The University of Edinburgh have been great and I'm delighted to have this support for it now".

"Success in skeleton bob relies on experience so my plan is to build that up in races over the next three years and to be ready for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver".

"The winners of the Royal Academy of Engineering Research Student Development Fellowships are a highly innovative group of young researchers studying important topics such as medicine, energy, security and sport", says Professor Peter Deasley FREng, Lead Assessor for the awards.

"The fellowships will enable them to initiate technical collaborations with overseas universities and industry and broaden their perspectives by learning languages and developing their individual skills, both technical and cultural".

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