WMG News - Latest news from WMG

Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts has announced today, Thursday 10^th July 2014, a £65 million pound research programme for WMG at the University of Warwick in partnership with Jaguar Land Rover.

WMG has taken part in a high profile event attended by global leaders in the engineering industry aimed at promoting cutting-edge technology and celebrating 50 years of the Grand Prix at Silverstone.

Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership (CWLEP) was among the partners of the ‘Driving Technological Change within British Manufacturing’ event in the build-up to the British Grand Prix last weekend.
Around 240 delegates attended the one-day event which attracted industry leaders and organisations to discuss a wide range of topics in a series of seminars and question and answer panels.

Mark Amor-Segan, Principal Engineer within the Energy & Electrical Systems team at WMG, facilitated a seminar on Energy Capture and Storage, focusing on the electrification of vehicles within motorsport and automotive, looking at optimum configurations to achieve best performance. The session also included Sylvain Filippi, Chief Technical Officer for the Virgin Racing Formula E Team and Paul Bostock, Senior Manager, Hybrids and Electrification at Jaguar Land Rover.

Margaret Low, Principal Teaching Fellow at WMG, has won an award in the University of Warwick's Research Impact and Public Engagement Awards.

The awards were announced by the Provost, Stuart Croft, and Pro-Vice-Chancellors Simon Swain and Christina Hughes on Thursday 3 July. Staff and PG students, from across the University gathered in the Physics Concourse at a reception to hear the winners announced.

These awards recognise staff for the time, hard work and consideration they put into engaging the public with the benefits of their research, and to recognise the myriad ways in which all staff and students at the University engage with local communities and businesses to improve people’s lives – in the region, in the UK and globally. Margaret won the award for her public engagement work with the Technology Volunteers.

Technology Volunteers are a group of students and staff at the University of Warwick who aim to encourage children to become creators, rather than consumers of technology. They offer support to local schools by assisting with technology-based projects and activities during lessons, or at after school clubs. They run a number of technology-based workshops with schools and community organisations in Coventry and Warwickshire.

Professor Thomas Nichols, Head of Neuroimaging Statistics at the Applied Neuroimaging Lab (Institute of Digital Healthcare), has been named on Thompson-Reuter's Highly Cited Researchers 2014 list.

Spotlighting some of the standout researchers of the last decade, 'Highly Cited Researchers 2014' represents some of world’s leading scientific minds. Researchers earn the distinction by writing the greatest numbers of reports officially designated by Essential Science Indicators℠ as Highly Cited Papers—ranking among the top 1% most cited for their subject field and year of publication, earning them the mark of exceptional impact. Thus, the listings of Highly Cited Researchers feature authors whose published work in their specialty areas has consistently been judged by peers to be of particular significance and utility.

While over 3000 researchers made the list, Professor Nichols is one of only 128 in the Neuroimaging and Behaviour group.

Parliament’s Select Committee for Business, Innovation and Skills came to WMG’s International Manufacturing Centre on Tuesday 1 July to hold an evidence session for its inquiry into Business-University collaboration.

During the formal sessions in WMG the Committee heard evidence from:

• Professor Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick
• Dr Richard Hutchins, Board Member, Coventry and Warwickshire LEP
• John Latham, Vice Chancellor of Coventry University
• Professor Kevin Warwick, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research of Coventry University
• Dr Carl Perrin, Director, Advance Manufacturing and Engineering Institute, Coventry University
• Will Searle, Managing Director, Axillium
• Tony Harper Head of Research and Advanced Systems Engineering for Jaguar and Land Rover

Engineering students from the University of Warwick are gearing up for an international racing event which will see them go head to head with their friends and rivals at Monash University.

Warwick Racing, assisted by staff from WMG and the School of Engineering, are taking their racing car (WR4) to compete in the UK Formula Student competition at Silverstone racetrack this July.

In the run-up to the competition the two sides, Warwick Racing and Monash Motorsport, have come together at the University of Warwick to share expertise as part of the Monash-Warwick Alliance.

Despite the spirit of friendly pre-race collaboration, the two sides will be pitted against each other in the three-day event starting on 9 July.

WMG was pleased to welcome a senior delegation from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) from Singapore on Friday 27th June.

Meeting with Professor Lord Bhattacharyya, the group was keen to hear about how WMG develops partnerships with industry and the significant economic benefits of such partnerships. They were also interested to understand the breadth of research undertaken by WMG which leads to the development of innovative products, processes and services.

The delegation, led by the Chairman of A*STAR Mr Lim Chuan Poh, met with a number of staff who gave an overview of the research that is undertaken at WMG before touring some of the Group’s impressive R&D facilities. The visitors heard from Professor Paul Jennings about WMG’s new Energy Innovation Centre, a centre of excellence for electric and hybrid vehicle batteries. They heard from Dr Stuart Barnes about Machining research, Professor Richard Dashwood about Materials research and Professor Theo Arvanitis about the Institute of Digital Healthcare. The group visited the new International Institute for Nanocomposites Manufacturing and heard about WMG’s research in Nanocomposites from Professor Tony McNally.

A*STAR is the lead agency for fostering world class scientific research and talent to support impactful innovation in Singapore. They support Singapore’s key economic cluster by providing intellectual, human and industrial capital to its partners in industry.

WMG was, last week, pleased to welcome to campus the first cohort of participants on the executive education programme from Inner Mongolia University (IMU) in China.

The group of 26 senior executive participants from IMU attended the Innovation and Leadership course which was led by Professor Sujit Banerji and delivered by Dr Jay Bal and Dr Xiao Ma. The executive training programme is a key result from a Memorandum of Understanding which was signed in 2012 by Professor Sujit Banerji, Executive Director of Postgraduate Programmes, and Professor XiaoChuan Guo, Dean of IMU.

The successful collaboration has been a result of International Partnership Fund (IPF) funding for development of partnerships between leading institutes around the world. WMG has established a relationship to foster collaboration with the School of Economics and Management at IMU, the leading university in the region.

Two researchers from WMG's Digital Lifecycle Management research group have won the Best Paper Award at the 2014 International Joint Conference on Mechanical, Design Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing held in Toulouse, France (June 18-20, 2014).

The team won the award for the paper: Franciosa, P., Das, A., Ceglarek, D., Bolognese, L., Marine, C., Mistry, A., 2014, "Design Synthesis Methodology for Dimensional Management of Assembly Process with Compliant Non-Ideal Parts."

The conference is organized jointly by AIP - PRIMECA (Ateliers Inter-établissements de Productique - Pôles de Ressources Informatiques pour la MECAnique), France; ADM (Associazione Nazionale Disegno di Macchine), Italy; and INGEGRAF (Asociación Española de Ingeniería Gráfica) from Spain. A total of 95 papers were presented during the conference.

Dr. Pasquale Franciosa is a Senior Research Fellow within the Digital Lifecycle Management team, and Abhishek Das is a doctoral student supervised by Professor Darek Ceglarek. The paper is also co-authored along with colleagues from WMG's industrial partners: Charles Marine (STADCO), Luca Bolognese (COMAU) and Anil Mistry (Jaguar Land Rover).

Monday 23rd June 2014 is National Women in Engineering Day. The aim of the day is to raise the profile and celebrate the achievements of women in engineering, and encourage more girls to consider engineering as a career.

National Women in Engineering Day is the inaugural event organised by the Women’s Engineering Society to celebrate their 95th anniversary as a charity supporting women in engineering. It has been recognised that a skills gap in engineering is looming, and one way of addressing this is to get more girls to consider engineering as a realistic career option for them. This will have the dual benefit of creating more diversity in the engineering sector (where fewer than 10% of the workforce is women), and creating a bigger talent pool of future engineers from which to recruit.

To support National Women in Engineering Day, WMG could think of no better way of celebrating the achievements of women in engineering then by taking some time to look at the fascinating career stories from some of our own staff and students. We have asked some of our colleagues to tell us about their career paths and what they love most about engineering. The responses clearly show very different reasons and interests which led people towards engineering and the range of very different areas that engineers can pursue. What many of those profiled have in common are the reasons that they developed their enthusiasm for engineering – love of being creative in problem solving, understanding how things work and how we can make them better, and that amazing moment when you see the results of your work making a difference.

Read some of our staff profiles

Read some of our student and alumni profiles

You can follow the discussion of National Women in Engineering Day on twitter using #NWED

Visit the NWED website.