The Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Theory and Simulation of Materials (TSM) has been awarded funding by the EPSRC

The Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Theory and Simulation of Materials (TSM) at Imperial College London has been awarded funding for a further five cohorts of PhD students starting from October 2014. This is part of a £350M investment by the EPSRC that was announced this morning by David Willetts, Universities and Science Minister.

 This new CDT in TSM will build upon the highly successful programme established in 2009 that has so far admitted over 50 EPSRC-funded students and been commended by the EPSRC, industry and international academics for its best practice in postgraduate training, including a suite of bespoke transferable skills courses, an enormously successful outreach agenda and enthusiastically-received student-led cohort-based activities. The research team involves 87 members of staff from nine departments across two faculties at Imperial, with expertise spanning the whole range of scales from electronic structure, through microstructure to the continuum. The requirement for TSM-CDT projects to bridge length and/or time scales has initiated a culture change in TSM research at Imperial by creating cross-disciplinary collaborations, generating new areas of research activity and providing suitably trained researchers to tackle them. Together with the multidisciplinary training it has also struck a chord with industry, leveraging income for EU and overseas studentships.

In this second phase the TSM-CDT will further enhance its impact by expanding the direct involvement of our external partners in training and research. Further culture change will be driven by identifying strategic focus areas for scale-bridging research projects in collaboration with industry. These will include theoretical and computational metal physics, an area of vital importance to UK industry yet critically under-represented in the research portfolio of UK universities, and software development to ensure that the new computational tools developed are made available for global use. It will also sustain the ethos of continuous innovation in training established over the last four years by engaging industry in the design and delivery of thoroughly revised taught courses (especially those pertaining to software development), providing further opportunities for peer learning and cohort-based group projects and increasing the integration of research activity into the training.

The new TSM-CDT will benefit from a more flexible funding model for studentships. In addition to eight studentships per cohort funded by the EPSRC, Imperial has committed a further four and at least three will involve external partners including Baker-Hughes, BP, the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Dstl,Element Six, Materials Design and Rolls-Royce. This means that it is anticipated that around one third of the 15 studentships per cohort will be available to students from outside the UK.

More information about the TSM-CDT may be found in the annual report for 2012-13, which is published today.