Three students from our department have taken part in a reception and networking event to celebrate Imperial’s international placement programmes.

The reception showcases the international mobility made possible by the UK's Turing Scheme, now in its second year.

In 2022-23, 226 Imperial undergraduate, Master's and PhD students received Turing Scheme funding to support their research, medical study and industrial placements at universities, research institutes, hospitals and companies around the world.

Fater Akuhwa - Global Fellows Program

PhD student Fater Akuhwa spoke at the reception about the Global Fellows Program held in Kigali, Rwanda last November, in partnership with the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS).

Fater, whose research is focused on developing 100% renewable-powered electricity grids for the future, joined around 40 PhD students from AIMS and Imperial on the five-day programme, to address topics on the theme of African Data Science Solutions, and says the program was "a great opportunity to further develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills in an interdisciplinary context.”

It was a new experience collaborating with students from diverse fields — including students from non-STEM disciplines — as they worked together to propose solutions to problems affecting Africa in the areas of healthcare, agriculture and more.

Brilliance in the room

“I saw first-hand that communicating in technical language in an interdisciplinary and intercultural team can be quite challenging, yet this is the very skill I need to become a globally minded scholar. I was also inspired by the amount of brilliance in the room as I exchanged ideas with other scholars from institutions all over Africa, and built connections that might open doors for future collaborations.”

“I recommend this program to other students as it is an experience that helps one to see how our research fits into the broader context of the research of others in solving real problems.”

Fion Foo - IROP

Undergraduate Fion Foo was among a group of students who were able to visit leading technology institutes across the world as part of the International Research Opportunities Programme (IROP) last summer.

The exchange programme sees students from top universities spending several weeks at partner institutes’ labs and gaining a unique research experience.

Fion is in the final year of our MEng in Electrical and Electronic Engineering degree, and describes her IROP experience at Cornell University as "no doubt one of the highlights of my undergraduate education."

"I had the opportunity to go to Cornell University to do research in the field of in-memory computing systems, and I have been able to continue my IROP research as part of my Final Year Undergraduate Project." 

Building more efficient computer processing through in-memory computer architectures aims to overcome a problem known as the von Neumann bottleneck, by bringing the CPU and memory closer together to minimise data movement.

Fion explains: "In an application that requires a large amount of data to be processed, such as in the artificial intelligence and healthcare industries, the data transfer would dominate the performance of the system, making it highly inefficient. My project is to carry out a functional unit implementation of a Content-Addressable Processing Engine (CAPE) analysing its performance, and the trade-offs between power, performance and area.”

Independence and confidence

"I was thrilled to take part as this was my first time in the USA, and I'm the first person from my family to have the chance to visit the States. I enjoyed learning about the culture and exploring the beautiful campus in Ithaca, located in upstate New York. It was a short six weeks there, so I pushed myself to work harder to complete the project assigned, and contribute to the work of the research group."

"I highly recommend this experience to anyone. The chance to try out research in the US, step out of my comfort zone and travel independently with confidence has shaped the way I see and think about life."

Zhengang Guo - Global Fellows Fund

Zhengang Guo is a PhD student in the department’s Communications and Signal Processing group. “I mainly study convex and nonconvex optimization methods to solve wideband signal direction of arrival estimation problems” something that has applications in radar, sonar, and communications.

He spent May to August last year at Cornell University supported by the Turing Scheme and Imperial Global Fellows Fund. Scholars on the scheme have the opportunity to delve into collaborative research projects, guided by their PhD supervisors and their host supervisors.

Zhengang was based at the new Cornell Tech campus in Manhattan, New York City. “I met many friendly and brilliant people, we exchanged promising ideas on research and enjoyed delicious suppers from different countries. I went jogging in Central Park, toured the city with postdocs and other PhD students, and enjoyed the 2023 campus-wide BBQ.”

“I joined Professor Anna Scaglione’s research group and the Signal, Information, Networks and Energy Laboratory (SINE Lab). We collaborated on a research project Near-Field Localization and Communications Using Graph Neural Networks to jointly estimate the range and direction of the source.”

While at Cornell, Zhengang was able to extend his research model from solely a data-driven method to a model-based method. “After the visit, I submitted a conference paper on the research to the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, and it has been accepted.”

A powerful partnership

Zhengang says he would definitely recommend the Global Fellows experience, and Cornell University, for “the opportunity to work with field-leading researchers in an innovative environment and live in a wonderful place with profound cultural connotations.”

“The SINE Lab and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell have an eminent reputation, and many outstanding scientists dedicated to research. I'm sure that both Imperial College London and Cornell University are the best places where I can successfully grow to become an expert.”

Find out more..

A key focus of the Turing Scheme is widening participation by providing enhanced funding to students who meet certain eligibility criteria. Find out more about the opportunities for international placements at Imperial supported by the scheme.