WMG is pleased to welcome Professor Peter Halley to visit the department in June. Professor Halley is an internationally-recognised leader in the field of starch-based biopolymers and bio-nanocomposites, based at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Professor Halley will be visiting Professor Tony McNally and WMG’s Nanocomposites research team during his visit and will be giving a seminar, which all Warwick staff and students are invited to attend.

Professor Halley’s seminar, entitled ‘Translational Polymer Research for Sustainable Polymers’, will be taking place on Thursday 13^th June (from 12 noon) in WMG’s International Digital Laboratory.

WMG at the University of Warwick is building a £2.3m centre to enable the West Midlands’ automotive supply chain to exploit the opportunities offered by lightweight vehicle technologies.

The new Automotive Composites Research Centre will provide local industry with hands-on technical expertise and equipment to develop its manufacturing capability for polymeric composites.

The requirement for lightweight structures will soon become the industry standard as automotive manufacturers seek to reduce emissions over the life-time of their vehicles.

By tapping into these new opportunities, the centre will help create jobs and growth in the West Midlands’ advanced manufacturing and engineering sector.

It has been announced, today, by the Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts that WMG’s Applied Engineering Programme will be one of the programmes benefiting from a £50m Catalyst Fund.

WMG, at the University of Warwick, has an established reputation of working with business and industry to deliver cutting-edge research, innovative products and services, and world class education programmes.

Professor Lord Bhattacharyya, Chairman and Founder of WMG said “We welcome this announcement from HEFCE which will help us to continue to deliver an education programme that meets the needs of industry. It is vital that our engineers have the right skills and knowledge to be able to develop world-class products that keep the UK on the global stage.”

The new Applied Engineering Programme is aimed at advancing industry-relevant skills of graduate engineers and those working in advanced manufacturing. A novel learning environment will focus on Manufacturing Engineering or Product Development Engineering, which will be taken into the workplace including through higher apprenticeships. The programme, will focus initially on the automotive sector, with Jaguar Land Rover as an initial co-investor.

A team of researchers from WMG took part in a visit to several academic and industrial facilities in Indiana, USA, in March, resulting in some exciting collaboration possibilities for the future.

The programme of meetings included visits to the Universities of Purdue (West Lafayette) and IUPUI (Indianapolis), as well as to several companies and battery research organisations in the area. The visits cemented links which will support WMG’s centre for the High Value Manufacturing Catapult – the centre of excellence aiming to accelerate the transfer and commercialisation of new and emerging technologies within UK manufacturing.

Researchers on the visit gained valuable knowledge and insights relevant to the future development of WMG’s Energy Innovation Centre. An early outcome of the visit is WMG being granted associate membership of the Battery Innovation Centre in Indiana, which will foster future collaboration between the two centres. Plans are already in place for reciprocal membership of WMG's Energy Innovation Centre and future visits from colleagues in Indiana.

Dr Greg Gibbons, Head of WMG's Additive Layer Manufacturing group, was featured on BBC's The One Show last night in a piece about the future of 3D printing.

One Show presenter, Marty Jopson, visited WMG's facilities to see the range of work that is currently taking place and the number of different sectors that are are already benefitting from the technology.

The full piece on The One Show can be viewed on BBC iPlayer for the next 7 days:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01rjzcc/The_One_Show_27_03_2013/?t=31m46s 

WMG's Professor Sridhar Seetharaman has been selected as the recipient of the Jerry Silver Award for Best Paper 2013 by the Association for Iron and Steel Technology (AIST) Metallurgy Technology Division. The award is for Professor Seetharaman's work entitled 'Effect of Silicon on Hot Shortness'.

The Jerry Silver Award is presented to the author of a process metallurgy or product applications technical paper judged to be the best of class by the AIST, where one of the authors is a student.

Professor Seetharaman has recently joined WMG as the RAEng / Tata Steel Research Chair in Low Carbon Materials Technologies.

The award will be presented to Professor Seetharaman during the AIST Metallurgy, Processing, Products and Applications Technology Committee Meeting in Canada, later this year.

A new interdisciplinary research centre for industrial biotechnology and biorefining was launched at Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) on 21 March. The Warwick Centre for Industrial Biotechnology and Biorefining (WCIBB) builds on existing strengths in chemistry, life sciences, engineering and manufacturing.

Industrial biotechnology and bioenergy are key research priorities for funding councils. The centre will establish new links with the growing UK biotechnology sector in biorenewables, bioplastics, and renewable materials for manufacturing.

WMG took part in the EEF National Manufacturing Conference 2013 in London on the 5th March 2013.

The conference, which featured addresses and debates from an impressive line-up of politicians and manufacturing leaders, focused on the topic of 'The Route to Growth' and looked at the challenges faced by UK manufacturing both today and in the future.

Representatives were available across the full range of WMG's activities, including for our involvement in the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, our work with SMEs at the International Institute for Product and Service Innovation and our Professional and Executive Education Programmes.

Included in the line-up of speakers were Rt. Hon. Ed Balls (Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer), Rt Hon the Lord Heseltine, Jim O'Neill (Chairman, Goldman Sachs Asset Mgmt), Mark Adams (VP, Corporate Planning at Toyota Motors Europe) and Deirdre Fox (Director of Strategic Business Development at Tata Steel). The event was chaired by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, presenter of Channel 4 News.

Updates of the event can be viewed on Twitter #ukmfgconf

More information is available on: http://www.manufacturingconference.co.uk/ 

The SME team from WMG, at the University of Warwick, have been working with Birmingham-based Barkley Plastics for the past year in a collaboration which has led to increased turnover for Barkley Plastics of over half a million pounds and the creation of three new jobs.

The WMG team are based in The International Institute for Product and Service Innovation (IIPSI), a building funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and University of Warwick that is dedicated for the use of small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) in the West Midlands region. Their in house Innovation Programme aims to encourage SMEs in understanding how new technology, processes and ideas can be implemented to develop new products and services to benefit their business. Companies can access three areas of support: Experience Led Innovation, Polymer Innovation and Digital Innovation.

WMG at the University of Warwick are to recruit ten new Professors and Associate/Assistant Professors including two new research posts in nanocomposite technologies.

Those new two new nanocomposite researchers will help engineers create new engineering products and materials using nanotechnology -the science of the very small manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale – but researching the very small will also create a huge size milestone for WMG as they will in fact be the 499th and 500th persons to be employed in WMG’s research buildings.