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Heriot-Watt University wins two Doctoral Training Centre funding packages

Heriot-Watt wins two Doctoral Training Centre funding packages to train scientists and engineers for Britain’s future.

Two groups involving Heriot-Watt University have won £11m funding for new Centres which will generate the scientists needed for Britain's future it was announced today (5 December 2008) by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the UK funding body for science and engineering.

Heriot-Watt is the lead institution in The Optics and Photonics Technologies Centre which is to receive £4.8m to train postgraduate Research Engineers to fill the gap in an industry which involves 1,000 photonics companies in the UK alone, supporting 250,000 jobs and generating £20bn of revenue. The global photonics market of £250bn is growing at 11% per annum. Across all fields of engineering, the Royal Academy of Engineering has identified that “the lack of UK-based students of sufficient quality endangers the supply chain of skilled personnel into UK industry and academia”.

Professor Andrew Harvey, leader of the new Centre, to be run in partnership with St Andrews, Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities, said, “Optics and photonics pervade life, from imaging, illumination and manufacturing, through its exploitation by the wider scientific community, for example, in medical assessment and treatment, environmental monitoring and metrology, to fundamental scientific research.

“In fact there is barely an aspect of modern life, and the industrial community integrated with it, that is not dependent upon optical and photonic technologies. The proposed centre will support research across the full range of Optics and Photonics Technologies from blue-skies, potentially transformative research in quantum optics to many examples of applied research.”

Meanwhile Heriot-Watt is also part of a second Doctorate Centre group to achieve funding success. The Scottish Doctoral Training Centre in Condensed Matter Physics, to be run in conjunction with St Andrews University and the University of Edinburgh, will, by linking three medium-sized departments, create a cluster which is internationally competitive in research with important implications for areas as diverse as communications, energy and health.

The Centre will provide state-of-the-art training for postgraduate students, using interactive video-conferencing technology for lecture courses. It has also won the support of leading academic collaborators around the world as well as twenty senior industrial collaborators including Cairn Energy, Compound Semiconductor Technology, Edinburgh Instruments, Oxford Instruments, Renishaw and Toshiba.

Professor Richard Warburton, who is leading Heriot-Watt’s involvement in the partnership, said, “the Centre will provide top-level training for PhD students in this important area of physics, ensuring that they are well placed to become the leaders of vital interdisciplinary research in the future.

“Linking the strengths of the three Universities, as well as the support of leading international academics and industrial collaborators, who will both advise on course content and contribute directly to the students via visits and presentations, means a world-class training resource for Scotland and for the leaders of tomorrow in this important field.

“We are delighted at this funding announcement, which is a direct result of the work Scottish Universities Physics Alliance (SUPA) in recent years, without which the proposals could not have been developed and supported.”