Dr Eleni Papadonikolaki awarded the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship

Dr Eleni Papadonikolaki, Associate Professor in Digital Innovation and Management and Founding Programme Director of MSc Digital Engineering Management, has been awarded the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship from The Royal Academy of Engineering for her research project ‘A ‘system-of-systems’ approach to meet a net-zero vision through digital twins.’

The Royal Academy of Engineering is harnessing the power of engineering to build a sustainable society and an inclusive economy that works for everyone. In collaboration with our Fellows and partners, we are growing talent and developing skills for the future, driving innovation and building global partnerships, and influencing policy and engaging the public. Together we are working to tackle the greatest challenges of our age.

The Fellowship, which is supported by the Leverhulme Trust, allows awardees to focus on full-time research for up to a year by covering the costs of a replacement academic to take over their teaching and administrative duties. This allows mid-career engineers to not only reinvigorate their research interests, but it also gives other junior academics the opportunity to gain valuable teaching and administrative experience by stepping in during the duration of the award.

Professor Stephen McLaughlin FREng FRSE, Chair of the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowships selection panel said: "I am very pleased not only to see such diversity in the topics covered by this year’s awards but also that the candidates are working in different regions across the UK. This is my last term chairing the selection panel and I am enormously proud that over the past four years we have been able to fund 21 talented awardees to focus on their research interests. This will significantly benefit their careers and also help to support UK innovation and economic development."

Dr Eleni Papadonikolaki said: “I am beyond happy to be awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to work on a new exciting project and set up new collaborations with the University of Florida and Western Sydney University. I am very grateful for the support of RAEng mentoring and many mentors, colleagues and industrial supporters who helped me achieve it.

Immense data and digital twins are promising for improving sustainability and meeting Net Zero visions. In this one-year project, I will explore systemic challenges of integrating heterogeneous data related to carbon emissions in developing digital twins of infrastructure projects and will propose solutions to untangle stakeholder complexity.”