Three new Centres for Doctoral Training at UCL

The centres will train the engineers of the future in quantum technologies, financial computing and biopharmaceutical manufacturing.

19 CDTs across the country have been announced today, in addition to the 72 Centres unveiled by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in November 2013 (seven of which are based at UCL).

EPSRC has been able to fund these new centres by renegotiating contracts with universities and by gaining further financial support from partners in industry and academia.

Mr Willetts said: "The Government will be investing in a further 900 students through an additional 19 Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), bringing our total investment in CDTs to £390 million. 

"In addition, universities, industry and other charitable partners will be adding a further £124 million to support the training of tomorrow's scientists and engineers. The combined public and private investment amounts to £764 million."

Professor David Delpy, Chief Executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), said: "The support of the academic and industrial communities has been tremendous and we would not have been able to fund these new centres without their cooperation. These new CDTs will provide training and advances in research in many areas of science and engineering including quantum technologies, manufacturing, robotics, energy and sustainability and brings the total number of Centres funded in this round to ninety one."

The three additional CDTs and their directors are:

Delivering Quantum Technologies

Director: Andrew Fisher (London Centre for Nanotechnology, UCL Physics & Astronomy)

Quantum technologies involve the control and manipulation of quantum states to achieve results not possible with classical matter; they promise a transformation of measurement, communication and computation. The highly-skilled researchers who will be the future leaders in this field must be equipped to function in a complex research and engineering landscape where quantum physics meets cryptography, complexity and information theory, devices, materials, software and hardware engineering. UCL's CDT in Delivering Quantum Technologies brings together a team of almost forty academic experts with key players from commerce and government and a network of international partner institutes to train those research leaders.

For more information visit the Delivering Quantum Technologies website here.

Financial Computing and Analytics

Director: Philip Treleaven (UCL Computer Science)

The CDT is a re-funding of the existing PhD Centre in Financial Computing and is a partnership of UCL, LSE and Imperial College. The CDT's research focus is 'big data business analytics' in areas such as computational finance, risk and regulation. The current PhD Centre collaborates with over 40 financial institutions, major retailers (Tesco, Sainsbury's, Unilever), healthcare (Bupa, Boots), analytics (dunnhumby, SAS) and data (Thompson Reuters) companies and the Regulators (BoE, FCA). The Centre receives over 600 enquiries/applications pa and is unique in placing its 70+ students in partner companies.

Emergent Macromolecular Therapies (EMT)

Director: Paul Dalby (UCL Biochemical Engineering)

This CDT will deliver a national capability for training the next generation of highly skilled future leaders and researchers for the biopharmaceutical manufacturing sector. Novel biopharmaceutical therapies are rapidly emerging with promising efficacy for currently intractable conditions, but they are also challenging to manufacture. Our PhD students will be capable of translating new scientific advances and manufacturing technologies to enable their safe production at affordable costs. They will explore new process engineering, modelling, analysis, formulation and drug delivery techniques, as well as novel therapies, as they emerge from the international science and engineering community.

Links

• UCL Engineering
• UCL Faculty of Mathematics and Physical Sciences
• EPSRC