JULY NEWS 2011

Warm congratulations to Eliana Athanassiades

Congratulations to Eliana Athanassides whose poster "Back to Black: Closing the Tyre Recycling Loop" was Highly Commended  in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department's poster competition. Eliana's poster automatically went forward to the GSEPS Research Symposium held on Friday 22nd July in the Great Hall Sherfield Building, where she won best poster title. 

We are pleased to announce that the winner of this years Pavior's Laing Travel Award goes to Natasha Sim MSc student on the Environmental Engineering & Business Management course .  Natasha is using her award to spend 6 weeks in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (a city of the former Soviet Union) collecting data in order to create a City Profile on Solid Waste Management. 

Dr Wouter Buyaert  has been invited to give a keynote lecture at the International Geomatics Conference in Bogota, Colombia in August 2011:

http://www.cce.gov.co/web/semana-geomatica-2011

Professor Howard Wheater has been appointed as a member of an international Court of Arbitration convened to consider a dispute between Pakistan and India under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. The Court visited the Neelum-Jhelum and Kishenganga hydroelectric projects in Kashmir in June.

 “Researchers to develop pipe material to improve water flow" The Engineer - "Researchers from Imperial College London and University College London are planning to develop a material that could be coated onto pipes to enable water to flow more efficiently through them. Many arid countries around the world such as Australia and Libya rely on vast pipeline networks to transport water to areas where it is scarce. However, the resistance between the pipe walls and the flowing water causes friction, which means that large amounts of energy have to be used to pump the large volume of water to its destination. To address this, Dr Michael Templeton, from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial, and Dr Andrew Wills, from the Department of Chemistry at UCL, are aiming to develop a material to reduce this friction."

http://www.theengineer.co.uk/news/researchers-to-develop-pipe-material-to-improve-water-flow/1009042.article

LAND USE MANAGEMENT INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP - JUNE 2011, IMPERIAL COLLEGE 

An international workshop on "Modelling land use change impacts on flood responses" was held at Imperial College on 13-14 June 2011.  The workshop brought together scientific experts from around the world to exchange results and ideas and to identify research needs and priorities and ways forward in the context of predicting land use and management impacts on flooding.  The meeting was attended by researchers (including five researchers from the EWRE group of the department of Civil and Environmental engineering) funded through FRMRC2 (http://www.floodrisk.org.uk/) , in addition to ten national and international researchers who specialise in aspects of modelling land use impacts on flooding. In total there were sixteen presentations, along with structured discussion sessions.  The workshop covered themes relevant to prediction of land use impacts, such as novel numerical modelling techniques, uncertainty quantification and propagation, prediction in ungauged basins and case study applications.  The presentations from the event can be accessed at:

http://www.floodrisk.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=284&catid=0&Itemid=37

LAND USE MANAGEMENT -  FRMRC DISSEMINATION EVENT

Managing the landscape to control flooding and sediments, at the same time maximizing its ecological and economic potential, is one of the major challenges facing land managers and environmental agencies.  The FRMRC (www.floodrisk.org.uk) has been funded for the last seven years to produce the scientific knowledge, databases, models and tools to address these (amongst other) challenges. On the 4^th of July a one-day event was held at Imperial College, aimed at the environmental agencies, land custodians, consultants and all other parties with a stake in how the rural landscape is managed to control floods and sediments. The key outputs from the FRMRC research, and other contributing research, were presented, with the aim of bringing our new science and tools to the user community.  The event was attended by over 30 participants from government, NGOs, research institutes, universities and private consultancies.  The event, which was structured to include technical presentations and focused discussion sessions, provided an invaluable opportunity to share the outputs from the research programme, receive feedback from a wide range of stakeholders and to discuss future research needs.  Further details can be found on www.floodrisk.org.uk   

Congratulations to  Jackie Fitzgerald, one of Professor Sue Grimes's students who completed her dissertation last summer.  Jackie has been awarded the CIWM Roger Perry Award 2011 for her thesis.  She will receve her award in the Autumn.

Professor Nigel Graham has been elected a Fellow of the International Water Association (IWA).  This is the second time that a group of individuals throughout the world have been recognised for the excellence of their contributions within the fields of Water Science, Technology and Management.  The first group of elections contained some 35 names.  Congratulations to Nigel on this thoroughly deserved recognition.