Up to 40  Indian Research Students, and Indian technology based companies are expected to benefit from a new  £10 million UK Research Centre announced today by Professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, Director of WMG at the UK’s University of Warwick and backed by 

Tata owned business including Tata Steel, and Jaguar Land Rover

 

The new  WMG Doctoral Training Centre in High Value, Low Environmental Impact Manufacturing Centre, is funded by a number of global companies and the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will train Engineering Doctorate (EngD) students, working in collaboration with technology focused companies, with a focus research into on High Value, Low Environmental Impact Manufacturing.

 

The centre will provide an experience that will ensure these students are very well placed to become the industrial research leaders of tomorrow.  It will rapidly expand to a level of 30 new participants per annum. WMG’s already close working relationship with a range of Indian companies and organisations mean that it expects a significant percentage of these students and companies to be linked to India.

 

WMG Director Professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya  said :

“We would expect that up to 40 of leading young Indian research scientists will join  the Centre through our already close and extensive connections to India.  WMG works closely with a number of Indian companies and research organisations including Tata, IIT Kharagpur and IIT-Bhubaneswar. “ 

“Our vision is to produce a new generation of manufacturing leaders with the high-level know-how and research experience essential to compete in a global manufacturing environment defined by high impact and low carbon.  They will be adept at working in multidisciplinary teams and exceptionally well networked internationally, and with demonstrable entrepreneurial flair. The WMG based Centre will address industrially challenging issues that enable companies to develop and implement effective low-environmental impact technology and policies that also benefit the ‘bottom line’.“ 

WMG  will provide students with  unrivalled access to industrial, international, academic, policy maker and political networks. At the core of WMG the Centre will be individual doctoral research projects based on real opportunities and problems in industry, which will deliver research excellence and innovations in industry.  Multidisciplinary team working is built in to the WMG programme.  Entrepreneurship will also be stressed as the Warwick research students will work together in a group project to take a “product” to market, part of a programme which will see them concurrently  gaining a Masters degree in Technology Entrepreneurship.  Participants will also benefit from time spent at one of WMG's international partners.

 

The new Centre will train Engineering Doctorate (EngD) students. These four- year postgraduate awards are  intended for leading researchers pursuing a career in industry. It provides postgraduate engineers with an intensive, broad-based research programme incorporating a taught component relevant to the needs of, and undertaken in partnership with, industry. It is a radical alternative to the traditional PhD, being better suited to the needs of industry and providing a more vocationally orientated doctorate degree, with the student spending a significant proportion of their time working in a company.

 

The Centres industrial partners  include  Jaguar Land Rover, IBM, Nikon, Oleo, PTC, RDM, Siemens and Tata Steel.

 

Jaguar Land Rover’s  Head of Research Dr Tony Harper said:

“I look forward to the new Centre developing high quality graduates who, as future manufacturing leaders, are fully conversant with the global business environment and the importance of low carbon, from an economic as well as an environmental standpoint.”

 

 

Peter Dunn, Head of Communications

University of Warwick+44 (0)24 76 523708 

or  mobile  +44(0)7767 655860 

p.j.dunn@warwick.ac.uk 

 

PR4Ind   PJD  13th January 2011