WISE Industry Day

WISE students met key figures from over a dozen national and international organisations, such as Arup, Natural England and Thames Water. The event was hosted by HR Wallingford, an independent engineering organisation that specialises in water-related challenges. Speaking at the event, Director of WISE Professor Dragan Savic said “Partnerships formed here will pioneer innovative approaches to understanding diverse problems that relate to water – whether it’s disease, flooding, or our use of it.”

Discussions were held on potential research that will directly tackle the challenges that industry and society faces.  One of the great strengths of the WISE programme is that students work closely with industry to solve problems in the real world. For industry partners this means access to research supervised by world-renowned academics in engineering. Students pitched potential projects to industry representatives. These covered a huge range of vital issues such as adapting to sea level rises, assessing the risk of liver fluke and modelling tidal energy in some of the country’s largest estuaries.

After the event, Chris Hughes, Europe Water Sector Director at Amec Foster Wheeler, said “From an industry sector perspective, the quality of applied research, innovation and excellent standard of individual presentations provided a huge degree of confidence and inspiration that the WISE CDT research agenda is being aligned with the challenges facing practitioners charged with developing solutions around global water management.”

Professor John Banyard, who chairs the WISE advisory board, added “It’s immensely satisfying that WISE students continue to support the economic, environmental and social strategies of business with their cutting edge bespoke research”.

With £12M of EPSRC funding, the WISE CDT is a collaboration of the GW4 Alliance: the Universities of Exeter, Bath, Bristol and Cardiff University.