First, PubhD... What about InngD - pub talks on engineering research?

Thanks to a tweet from Professor Trevor Drage, "soon to be former Professor at University of Nottingham, in clean fossil energy and carbon capture... Relocating to Wellington NZ" (that's what his Twitter profile says), we have learned of the "PubhD".

From the PubhD blog, it involves explaining the subject matter of a doctoral research project in language intelligible to a layperson, and takes place, naturally enough, in a pub. It envisages:

"A monthly event at which 3 or 4 local PhD student speakers, from any discipline from Art History to Quantum Mechanics, explain their work to an audience of laypeople.
The talks would be about 10 minutes long and would be followed by up to 20 minutes of (friendly!) Q&A.
The “friendly” aspect is important. This isn’t about bringing PhD students into a “lion’s den” to be grilled about their studies. The audience, we hope, will be genuinely interested in hearing about a wide variety of academic areas."

PhD students would get a pint (seems fair!) plus some public speaking and public engagement practice, while the audience would have something interesting to listen to. The first event is provisionally schedule to take place in Nottingham (home of the Efficient Fossil Energy Technologies industrial doctorate centre) on 22 January 2014.

We like this idea, but think it needs to extend to Engineering Doctorates (EngDs), so would like to propose that our friends in Nottingham also allow some "InngD" talks by EngD research engineers.

It might also be something that could be taken up by other universities and/or industrial doctorate centre as part of their public outreach and STEM engagement work.

Improving public awareness of STEM

Many EngD researchers contribute to efforts to promote uptake of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects. Some initiatives are undertaken by industry sponsors; some are promoted by institutions - for example, the IET has supported events marking Ada Lovelace Day; and other STEM projects are undertaken by universities or by industrial doctorate centres (IDCs).

Sophie Causon-Wood of the IDC in Systems at University of Bristol has sent word of two great projects undertaken by EngD researchers this summer:

• The Systems Centre recently organised a two-day event in which students learned the skills of writing and creating a short film to communicate their research in an accessible way. The event was led by Kate Butler, a highly-experienced ex-BBC journalist and documentary producer. Read more about it here.
• The Centre also hosted two outreach sessions, welcoming local school students to the centre to introduce them to engineering and its flavour of systems thinking. Read more about it here.

For those of us engaged in research it is reminiscent of the Einstein quote: "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."

Let us know if you are engaged in any interesting STEM initiatives (and did you know the AEngD is currently running its own Engineering Research Writer of the Year Award to promote public understanding of EngD research projects?).

Understanding the EngD Impact - share your experiences!

A short-term pilot study, supported by the AEngD and EPSRC, aims to understand the various forms of impact which EngD programmes have made over years. The key objective is to define and understand what is the ‘impact’ of EngDs and identify how it can best be evidenced. Dr. Fumi Kitagawa, lecturer in enterprise studies at Manchester Business School is leading the project and has provided the following overview:

The focus of the study is on understanding the impact of the EngD, with specific focus on:

1. impact on industry partners providing some hard evidence of the value of EngD project sponsorship to industry, and
2. career pathways, identifying how the EngD experience shapes the career paths of Research Engineers/ EngD Alumni.

Rationale

Whilst benefits and strengths of EngD programmes are recognised over years and anecdotally acknowledged, there is a need to provide frameworks that answer the question – “What is the nature of EngD Impact?”, and then demonstrate the extent of such impact by identify tangible data-sets and evidences. This is a pertinent question to ask after 20 years since the Parnaby report was published, by examining the accumulated impact of the EngD. Demonstrating the impact is imperative for the future of the EngD programmes and the future of doctoral training that is relevant to industry and societal needs, especially in times of austerity.

Help needed

This pilot study is being conducted by a small research team at Manchester Business School. We are conducting telephone interviews in July 2013 (interview duration about half an hour). We would like to talk to RE Alumni, and key industry partners with various EngD experiences, illustrating different impacts from the EngD programmes. In order to complete this study, the support of the IDCs/EngD Centres is essential. It would be extremely helpful if the AEngD member Centres could give contacts of alumni and industry partners. We are looking for 2-3 alumni and key industry contacts from individual Centres.

Thanks for your kind attention and co-operation in advance. Please get in touch for any queries and suggestions. You can email me at Fumi.kitagawa@mbs.ac.uk.

More EngD bloggers and websites

The AEngD steering committee met yesterday at Reading University and during a discussion of various aspects of the web, PR man Paul Wilkinson highlighted the launch of this blog and its 'blog-roll' feature.

Since that meeting, a few more blogs have been identified. For example, Paul Jeffrey of the STREAM IDC sent details of three water-related sites:

• Jo-fai Chow's 'Blend it like a Bayesian!'
• Jack Bloodworth's 'Catchment Jack'
• Ben Ward's Integrated Infrastructure ​Asset Management

(Ben's isn't, strictly, a blog - Wix sites are more websites than blogs and so don't have the RSS update capabilities of blogs. Updates won't appear in the listing, but it's well worth a look.)

If you have a blog related to your EngD research, please let us know and we can share it with other people in the EngD community.

To RE or not to RE?

An email from Dr Andrea Haworth, Centre Manager at the Industrial Doctorate Centre in Machining Science (University of Sheffield) has got people talking about "how IDCs refer to EngD students/Research Engineers (and perhaps more importantly how EngDs refer to themselves)."

We appreciate that there is good reason and a strong steer to call them “Research Engineers”, but many people have a job title “Research Engineer” and aren’t EngD candidates. 

I really do try, but if I refer to  “Research Engineers”, most people don’t know that I’m talking about, or might, at best, assume that I mean someone who has gained the EngD qualification.

I tend to alternate between “EngD student” (which I don’t like but which is sort of understood) or ”EngD Research Engineer”, or as a complete get out, just “EngD”.  On business cards the students are referred to Research Engineer/ EngD Candidate or similar.

I was wondering whether “Postgraduate Research Engineer” might do (cf “Postgraduate Research Student”).  Or have I just invented something else to confuse? How do other IDCs handle this? 

Responses

• Sally Hawthorne at Southampton's IDC on transport and the environment said: "the students themselves wish to be known as ’EngD researchers’ and that’s what’s on their door signs and on their business cards."
• From the Manufacturing Technology centre at Nottingham, David Shipley said: "We tend to call ours Research Engineers or EngD Research Engineers. They seem to appreciate not being referred to as students externally. ... Ours tend to have Research Engineers on their business cards."
• Steven Yeomans (Loughborough's CICE) also said: "I use Research Engineer when dealing with anyone other than internal university systems, where I then use the term EngD student."
• David Stanley (Nuclear Engineering IDC) adopts the same approach: "externally we try to use 'Research Engineers' as much as possible and we also get them to put this on business cards. It adds a bit of kudos at conferences etc."
• Justine Easten from STREAM's Newcastle location, says: "I use EngD Research Engineers, and our researchers have business cards to say this, followed by their industrial sponsors name...."

The AEngD has tended to use 'Research Engineer' too, but what do you think? If you are engaged in an EngD programme, what title do you prefer?

Engineer yourself a lucrative career

"i-Education", within the Independent newspaper's succinct sister edition, yesterday (4 April 2013) had a feature on the demand for technical qualifications. Journalist Amy McLellan reported:

One increasingly popular alternative to the PhD, yet carrying the same academic weight, is the Engineering Doctorate. The qualification was launched in 1992 and it's thought around 2000 have either gained an EngD or are in the process of studying at one of 29 Industrial Doctorate Centres. Each has its own speciality, from formulation engineering at the University of Birmingham, to nanomaterials at Surrey or nuclear engineering at Imperial or Manchester.

"There is feedback from industry that they value the EngD very highly," says a spokesman for the Association of Engineering Doctorates. With a programme described as a four-year interview, research engineers spend 70 to 80 per cent of their time working on a research project for companies. "It fits them well for their future and the outputs from the research are not just valuable in terms of career advancement but also in terms of developing products, processes and intellectual property," says the spokesman. "It's very satisfying."

How many EngDs?

We were contacted last week by a journalist who wanted some basic background about the EngD qualification ("when was the qualification launched, how many people are studying for them (or have already qualified), how many IDC specialist centres are there...").

When and where?

The first question was easy. The EngD was launched in 1992 - in fact, the AEngD launch last November marked the 20th anniversary of the qualification - though the infrastructure of research centres took a while to establish.

The third question wasn't too hard either. There are currently around 28 or 29 UK industrial doctorate centres. Why "around"? Well, one centre at Oxford University does things differently and awards a DPhil instead of an EngD, so we think it's 29 in total, with 28 IDCs delivering EngD graduates.

How many?

The second question, though, was perhaps the hardest to answer accurately.

We know from the EPSRC's own review in March 2007 that "some 1230" Research Engineers (REs) had been enrolled (sponsored by over 510 different companies), but more up-to-date information isn't easily available.

We can't just extrapolate forward from 2007, as the number of IDCs soon grew from the initial five, with five added in 1997, and more in 2001 and 2006. By 2007, there were 22 IDCs, and the EngD landscape has continued to grow and constantly change, with REs being recruited throughout the year, not just for autumn admission. Also, enrolment figures may over-estimate the number of completed EngDs; we need to account for attrition (REs who, for whatever reason, don't complete their research) before we can give an accurate estimate of the number of EngDs awarded.

When EPSRC chairman Paul Golby (right) spoke at the AEngD launch he said approximately 1400 EngD students had been trained (presentation available here). Total EngD enrolments will be higher than this, of course: scores of REs are currently engaged on their research, and others will have dropped out. Could total enrolments now be around the 2000 mark?

The AEngD and EPSRC are undertaking some research (with Manchester Business School) to look at the impacts of the EngD programme and from this we hope to get a more accurate picture of the overall success of the qualification.

Meanwhile, some centres are approaching significant landmarks. We understand the Manchester-based Nuclear Engineering IDC, founded in 1992, originally more focused on manufacturing, now more specialised, and spanning eight institutions, is now approaching its 200th graduate. More recently-formed IDCs - such as Reading's TSBE - will deliver their first EngD graduates in 2013, while others, newer still, are just recruiting their first cohort.

AEngD bloggers and Tweeters

EngD research engineers are often keen to share their ideas online, so we have started to collate a list of blogs that relate to all aspects of EngD research.

Some blogs have been created by industrial doctorate centres (the Technologies for Sustainable Built Environments centre at University of Reading, for example), while others have been created by REs. For instance, the TSBE blog links to two further examples created by Reading REs involved in research into renewables:

• Marek Kubik writes about his research and, in his own words "frequently ventures into territories such as engineering, economics and politics. The occasional escapade off topic into things that interest me might also find its way in here."
• Peter Burgess's Set in Etch-a-Sketch covers his "views on all things renewable and sustainable energy."

Twitter also provides some useful links to EngD bloggers. @The_AEngD currently follows several REs who resort to 140 characters, some of whom write substantially more on their blogs. For example...

• Maria Felice is a mechanical engineering-focused research engineer at the Systems IDC at University of Bristol.
• Laura Daniels' Energy Assortment is a recently re-started blog by another RE at TSBE in Reading
• Mesut Pala is researching construction supply chains at Loughborough's CICE (though it appears his blog has been neglected of late, and has no RSS feed)
• Ben Betts is Stoatly Different, and is a RE at Warwick's International Digital Lab.

Please let us know if you have an EngD-related blog that you'd like to be added to our AEngD blog-roll.

Welcome to the AEngD blog

Welcome to the blog of the Association of Engineering Doctorates (the AEngD). As our profile says, the AEngD is a community engaged in research in engineering and related disciplines. It encourages high calibre research engineers (REs) to undertake EngD programmes at university-based Industrial Doctorate Centres (IDCs), funded by EPSRC with backing from UK industry sponsors, many of them companies at the leading edge of innovative thinking and practice.

AEngD members include almost all of the UK's university-based centres offering the EngD qualification. In total, we currently have some 25 centres covering more than 40 universities, as some centres involve two more universities in their specialist research. Across these centres, we have a growing community of (to date) almost 300 individual members, including current RE's, alumni, sponsor staff and academics and other university staff.

Officially launched on 1 November 2012 at the Royal Academy of Engineering, the AEngD is funded by its member institutions, but has no full-time staff. It therefore relies on the time and effort volunteered by people from across its network. It is managed by a steering committee, and is supported by an external communications consultant (Paul Wilkinson).

This blog augments the main news feed on the AEngD website (and complements our places on Facebook and Twitter), and is intended to be a place where we share news and views, and - hopefully - get feedback about our activities. It will also be a place where we will link to blogs run by some of the IDCs and others written by individual members.