PhD students win top prizes at IStructE Young Researchers Conference
Postgraduate research students from the School of Engineering took home the top prizes at the Institution of Structural Engineers Young Researchers Conference on Wednesday 17 March.
Well done to the following students:
- Zach Wynne won both the judges’ and people’s votes in the oral presentation category for his presentation on ‘Learning from in-service behaviour of a 3D printed steel footbridge’
- Alicja Przystup won the poster presentation category for her poster on ’Extremes of engineered timber’
- Rich May took second place in the poster presentation category for his poster on ‘Indirect structural health monitoring of bridges using mobile sensor data’
The annual conference offers young researchers a chance to present their work and receive feedback from academics and industry leaders.
This year’s event, which was sponsored by ARUP, Laing O’Rourke and IABSE, took place virtually with its largest ever audience drawn from around 50 countries.
Presentation winner Zach Wynne said, “The young researchers conference was a fantastic chance to engage with the broad range of cutting-edge research that's happening across the profession, from non-destructive testing to state-of-the-art structural modelling.
“I was drawn to the conference by the chance to share my research with a wide and varied audience. This engagement, interaction and collaboration between academia and industry is vital if structural engineers are going to tackle the climate emergency and build a brighter future.”
Dr Thomas Reynolds, Chancellor's Fellow in Civil Engineering at the School of Engineering, commented, “This event is something of a rite of passage for structural engineering PhDs in the UK, so there’s always a fantastic range and standard of research on show. The fact that Edinburgh had three students winning prizes is a great indicator of the quality of our postgraduate students”.