The 2009 MSc Competition

The MSc Competition offers three £6,000 grants to Support Multi-Disciplinary Cross-Departmental MSc Projects

Bridging the Gaps: Sustainable Urban Spaces aims to develop and support inter-disciplinary research into topics related to sustainable urban spaces. An effective way to foster a link between researchers in different departments is to jointly supervise a student project.

The competition encourages researchers from different disciplines to work together as they supervise research students. The competition winners will be researchers from different disciplines who have identified a relevant area of cross-disciplinary research.

The winners will be given an award of £6,000 to cover the course fees for, and additional payments to, a new MSc student to carry out the research on a part-time basis. Not only does this build interdisciplinary links between the supervisors, but it also introduces a new generation of researchers to this area and style of research.

Submissions will be assessed on the quality of the research topic, which must be multi-disciplinary, and have the potential to produce new findings. The topic should lead to a project that can be completed by a student within the time frame allotted on their enrolled course. Applicants must clearly show how the research topic addresses sustainable urban spaces.

There are three £6,000 awards available.

Application Details

To apply for the 2009 Competition, two academics from different departments who meet the eligibility requirements must complete the application form and email it to James Paskins (j.paskins@ucl.ac.uk) by the 21st of August 2009.

Previous Winners
The winning entries for the 2008 competition

• Contribution of rooftop rainwater harvesting to the water supply-demand balance in London - a case study which will be jointly supervised by Luiza Campos from Civil Environmental and Geomatic Engineering and Mike Batty from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.
• A New Hydride Fuel Cell Hybrid for Zero Emissions Vehicles which will be jointly supervised by Dan Brett from Chemical Engineering and Xiao Guo from Chemistry.
• Uncertainty in building performance simulations which will be jointly supervised by Richard Chandler from Statistical Science and Mike Davies from The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies

Detailed Information

            Funding for winning projects:

The award will be paid to the departmental account of the first supervisor (the lead applicant). We will arrange to transfer the full amount on, or after, the end September 2009. How the money is spent is left to the discretion of the supervisors. However, experience from previous MSc competitions suggests that offsetting student fees initially, and then using any balance to pay a stipend, is one successful model. It has also been found that it is useful to stagger the payment of the stipend, paying the student at the start and end of each term.

            Conditions of the award:

• Supervisors will inform the Bridging the Gaps team when a student has been appointed.
• Both supervisors are expected to actively participate in supervision of the student for the duration of the project.
• One of the team, a supervisor or the student, must present a progress report at the Bridging the Gaps annual dissemination event for the year that the project is running. Annual dissemination events will be held in June date to be confirmed.
• A poster about the MSc must be provided to the Bridging the Gaps team two weeks before the student completes and submits their thesis.
• The final student report must be made available as a UCL eprint, which will be linked to from the main Bridging the Gaps website.

Failure to adhere to these conditions will make the supervisors ineligible for future Bridging the Gaps funding.

Eligibility Requirements

The applicants must agree to the above conditions and satisfy the eligibility requirements, which can be found here.