Future Infrastructure and Built Environment

Entry requirements

Applicants for this course should have achieved a UK 2:1 Honours Degree.

Successful applicants require high-level technical engineering skills. Candidates are likely to have a background in any relevant engineering discipline (including civil, mechanical, chemical, manufacturing, electrical and information), or in any relevant scientific discipline (including materials science, earth science, and computer science), or in other relevant disciplines such as architecture, project management, and other cognate fields. Industrial experience is helpful but not necessary.

Months of entry

October

Course content

The aim of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment is to develop the infrastructure professionals of the future, equipped with a versatile and cross-disciplinary skill set to meet the most complex emerging challenges and contribute effectively to better infrastructure decision-making in the UK.

This four-year course comprises an initial MRes year, followed by a three-year PhD programme. Continuation on to the PhD is conditional on satisfactory performance in the MRes year. Full funding is available for eligible applicants. This cross-disciplinary programme aims to address the major threats to infrastructure and turn them into opportunities. These include infrastructure resilience against technological opportunities and environmental causes; infrastructure resilience in a world of economic, social, political and cultural change; and infrastructure resilience to support urbanisation and demographic change.

The objectives of the course are to:

• deliver a coherent approach to postgraduate research training in resilient infrastructure, balancing the conflicting objectives of specialisation and generalism, consistent with the Department of Engineering’s general engineering undergraduate education approach;
• equip the graduates of the MRes course with the research skills and training to enable them to make a seamless transfer and an accelerated start to the PhD programme;
• develop and equip the MRes postgraduate students with relevant research skills rooted in a contextual framework that includes wider engineering, social, scientific and business-related disciplines linked to professional practice by producing graduates who combine a breadth of knowledge with the depth of specialist knowledge;
• expose students to the wide range of industry-relevant research contexts, opportunities and challenges;
• develop students’ personal, professional practice and commercial skills, including entrepreneurship;
• expose the students to a range of complex, multi-sector, cross-disciplinary problems that face future infrastructure and built environment via the mini-projects; and
• train the students in transferable communications, business and research skills.