Epsrc Centre Doctoral Tender

Funded Value5111552Funded PeriodOct 19 - Mar 28FunderEPSRCProject StatusActiveProject CategoryTraining GrantProject ReferenceEPS0228211In a consortium led by Heriot-Watt with St Andrews Glasgow Strathclyde Edinburgh and Dundee this proposal for an EPSRC CDT in Industry-Inspired Photonic Imaging Sensing and Analysis responds to the priority area in Imaging Sensing and Analysis. It recognises the foundational role of photonics in many imaging and sensing technologies while also noting the exciting opportunities to enhance their performance using emerging computational techniques like machine learning.Photonics role in sensing and imaging is hard to overstate. Smart and autonomous systems are driving growth in lasers for automotive lidar and smartphone gesture recognition photonic structural-health monitoring protects our road rail air and energy infrastructure and spectroscopy continues to find new applications from identifying forgeries to detecting chemical-warfare agents. UK photonics companies addressing the sensing and imaging market are vital to our economy see CfS but their success is threatened by a lack of doctoral-level researchers with a breadth of knowledge and understanding of photonic imaging sensing and analysis coupled with high-level business management and communication skills. By ensuring a supply of these individuals our CDT will consolidate the UK industrial knowledge base driving the high-growth export-led sectors of the economy whose photonics-enabled products and services have far-reaching impacts on society from consumer technology and mobile computing devices to healthcare and security.Building on the success of our CDT in Applied Photonics the proposed CDT will be configured with most 40 students pursuing an EngD degree characterised by a research project originated by a company and hosted on their site. Recognizing that companies interests span all technology readiness levels we are introducing a PhD stream where some 15 students will pursue industrially relevant research in university labs with more flexibility and technical risk than would be possible in an EngD project.Overwhelming industry commitment for over 100 projects represents a nearly 100 industrial oversubscription with 4.38M cash and 5.56M in-kind support offered by major stakeholders including Fraunhofer UK NPL Renishaw Thales Gooch and Housego and Leonardo as well as a number of SMEs. Our request to EPSRC for 4.86M will support 35 students from a total of 40 EngD and 15 PhD researchers. The remaining students will be funded by industrial 2.3M and university 0.93M contributions giving an exceptional 23 cash gearing of EPSRC funding with more students trained and at a lower cost head to the taxpayer than in our current CDT.For our centre to be reactive to industrys needs a diverse pool of supervisors is required. Across the consortium we have identified 72 core sup