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:

2020 Student Prize Winners
SectionAwards
 EWRE Award: Tharit Pornsirianant
Steps towards recovery of indium from end-of-life screens
Supervised by: Professor Sue Grimes / Moisés Gomez Soto
Fluid Mechanics  Award: Yashvina Raventharan
Reverse engineering for complex systems in building physics   
Supervised by: Dr John Craske
Geotechnics Award: Wei Jian Ang
Modelling rotational behaviour of a joint in a segmental grey cast iron bolted tunnel lining
Supervised by: Dr Jamie Standing
Structures Joint Award: Yiwei Chen
Large strain finite element analysis on hyperelastic material
Supervised by: Professor Bassam Izzuddin

Joint Award: Thomas McLean
Optimal forms of regolith-based arches subject to inertial loading in low-gravity conditions
Supervised by: Dr Christian Málaga-Chuquitaype
 Transport Award: Adam Gough
Healthy equitable cities: Developing an accessibility framework which considers the impacts of air pollutants, crime and destination quality 
Supervised by: Dr Aruna Sivakumar /Dr Fangce Guo
2020 Student Conference Prize Winners
2018 Student Conference: Poster Prize Winners