To mark the end of the four-year MEng programme in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and for many, the end of university life, a two-day Student Conference is normally held each year at the end of June. This provides an opportunity for the year’s graduates to present the results of their research, carried out in the final year over a period of four months, to an audience of academic staff, industry, postgraduate researchers, and fellow undergraduates, in the form of a poster and an oral presentation. The Conference offers an excellent way to showcase the skills of our final year students as well as the diversity of research undertaken within the departmental Sections of Environmental and Water Resource Engineering, Fluid Mechanics, Geotechnics, Structures, and Transport.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic this year, however, the Conference could not be held in the normal way, and students presented their research findings in an Oral and Poster presentation via Teams to a group of assessors within each Section. In a year in which our students showed extraordinary strength of character, resilience and determination to achieve their end-goal, for which they should be highly commended, we celebrated their achievements at an End-of-Year ‘Bafta-style’ Awards ceremony on Teams on 26th June 2020.
Awards were presented to students in the Environmental and Water Resource Engineering, Geotechnics, Structures, and Transport Sections for Best Overall Projects, and in the Fluid Mechanics Section, for the Best Student Oral Presentation delivered in a Section-led Teams Seminar. This year’s winners were:
| Section | Awards |
|---|---|
| EWRE | Award: Luis Nunez Clavijo How can blockchain technology be used to mitigate climate change Supervised by: Dr Po Heng Henry Lee |
| Fluid Mechanics | Award: Umniya Khalil Ahmed Al Khalili Statistical distribution of crest heights in intermediate waters Supervised by: Dr Ioannis Karmpadakis |
| Geotechnics | Award: Wanru Cynthia Yang An artificial neural network algorithm for the numerical thermal integrity test of hydrating concrete piles Supervised by: Dr David Taborda |
| Materials | Award: Javier Sanchez Fernandez A phase field-based model for predicting creep crack growth in metals Supervised by: Dr Emilio Martinez Paneda |
| Structures | Award: Changxiao Fu Buckling of 2D cellular lattice structures with energy absorption and structural isolation applications Supervised by: Professor Leroy Gardner, Dr Andrew Phillips |
| Transport | Award: Jade Low Comparing ground-based detections of contrails with flight data and model forecasts using computer vision Supervised by: Dr Marc Stettler |
| 2022 Student Conference Prize Winners | |