EPSRC announce funding for 72 new Centres for Doctoral Training, including seven at Imperial

A Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) involving Chemical Engineering and six other Imperial College Departments will launch in 2014, it has been revealed today.  CDTs are four year training programmes that combine PhD-level research projects with taught components, specifically designed to cultivate researchers and equip them with essential transferable skills needed to meet a global demand for interdisciplinary scientists.

Fluid Dynamics plays a vital role in a vast range of modern devices, industrial processes and natural phenomena such as vehicle aerodynamics, food and chemical manufacturing, the production of oil and gas and the flows that govern our cardiovascular systems and the planet’s oceans.  The new CDT hopes to address the current shortage of researchers with an understanding of fluid dynamics across a variety of scales, which should in turn have a positive impact on the UK’s economy and the quality of her citizens’  lives.

The new CDT’s Director of Operations Professor Omar Matar (Chemical Engineering) hopes to produce the best possible next generation of PhD-level researchers.  “The idea is to bring expertise from different Departments together so that PhD candidates can develop skills that cover the whole field of fluid dynamics,” he said. “By combining analytical, computational and experimental methods with the College’s award-winning transferable skills programme, graduates of the CDT can expect to be equipped with the expertise to immediately tackle a huge variety of industrial challenges, or become future leaders in fluid dynamics academia.   Students will also have industrial exposure through targeted internships with our industrial partners.  I’m extremely excited about the prospects.”

The CDT in Fluid Dynamics across Scales is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and is an Imperial-wide partnership also involving the Departments of Aeronautics, Bioengineering, Civil Engineering, Earth Science and Engineering, Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering.