07 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

We are looking for a highly experienced and skilled PDRA who will work on the EPSRC (Part of the UK national research council) projects EP/V051164/1/1 “Developing Machine Learning-empowered Responsive Manufacture of Industrial Laser Systems“ and EP/Y017307/1 “Autonomous and Intelligent Laparoscopy Trainer with Real-Time Feedback”. The former project aims to develop new automated robotic processes for the assembly and manufacture of industrial laser systems taking advantage of the latest research in robotics and machine learning. The PDRA will be responsible for developing machine learning techniques to automate laser alignment and assembly of optical pieces. A fundamental challenge in building optical laser systems is alignment of pieces, which typically requires high skills and much time. An automated mechatronic system can embed machine intelligence inspired from human expert performances. The PDRA will be responsible for developing the machine intelligence for automation, search and optimization algorithms. The latter project aims to develop an automated laparoscopy training system, which can provide feedback to the trainees. The task of the PDRA in this second project will be to develop machine intelligence to classify and categorize videos of expert and novice performances and to develop the video streaming setup to retract, embed, and visualize relevant videos at the same time and on top of each other.  

The Research Associate will work within the HAPiWEC team at the Edinburgh campus of Heriot-Watt University.  They will be expected to develop and test the control engineering control algorithms in both software and wave tank environments, which will be a key deliverable of the project.  The control algorithms will be made openly available and easily tunable through software, developed by the Research Associate in collaboration with the HAPiWEC software engineer. An essential feature of the project is to allow future control algorithm developers to test their algorithms with the a step-change in speed.  The Research Associate will need to collaborate closely with the rest of the HAPiWEC team to turn the research outputs into usable software code that is sharable with and usable by a diverse range of target audiences. The Research Associate will also need excellent inter-personal skills to lead on communication with the external participants in the HAPiWEC programme. 

EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship roles are funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of Heriot-Watt University’s Doctoral Training Partnership award. 

The EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship scheme is intended to help universities recruit and retain the best newly qualified doctoral (e,g PhD, EngD) students, and help them launch careers in research.  

Within the EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowshiphip scheme, the Innovation Expert (INE) post holders will work on projects within the EPSRC remit with focus on the development of impactful, mathematics-driven innovation in varied areas of science and technology. INEs will interface between different areas of EPSRC remit, working on specific projects within the Centre for Mathematics-Driven Innovation (M-DICE), aiming to address industrial and/or applied sciences challenges by employing cutting-edge mathematical and statistical modelling. 

IBioIC are seeking to appoint a full-time Senior Fermentation Scientist / Manager for a period of 5 years who will be responsible for management of the fermentation (Upstream Bioprocessing) projects that are performed within the FlexBio (The Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre’s (IBioIC) Bioprocessing Scale-up facility within the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences (EPS) and within the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Biophysics and Bioengineering (IB3).  

The role will be partly lab and partly office based and primarily involves ensuring fermentation and scale-up projects are conducted for industry and academic clients in a safe, professional, timely and organised manner. The role holder is expected to work with the wider Scale-up team (including downstream processing team), facility manager and IBioIC management team to ensure the Scale-up facility facilitates the commercialisation of biotechnology projects and company from lab scale to pilot scale using a fee-for-service model of operation. 

As a technical expert in the field of fermentation and microbiology, the role holder is required to take responsibility for all day-to-day aspects of fermentation project scoping, planning, execution and analysis, as well as being the point of contact for industry and academic clients during project execution. The role includes management of technical staff, with responsibility for their personnel management, training and development, as well as hands on participation in technical tasks as determined by the workload and technical expertise required. 

Applications are invited for a full-time Research Fellow position to work on industry-funded projects.  The initial appointment will be for 2 years with a high probability that the appointment will be extended, subject to successful completion of the planned research. This is an exciting opportunity for an exceptionally motivated and hard-working person interested in laboratory research in the field of multiphase fluid flow in subsurface reservoirs. This role will be based in the Centre for EOR and CO2 Solutions at the Institute of Geoenergy Engineering within the School of Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society at Heriot-Watt University’s campus in Edinburgh. The Centre is internationally recognised as a centre of excellence for its pioneering work on understanding the complex mechanisms involved in multiphase flow in porous media applicable to subsurface storage of CO2 natural gas and hydrogen, oil and gas recovery, and many other applications related to the subsurface reservoirs.  The centre works closely with several national and international energy companies. 

The successful candidate is expected to support the delivery of several laboratory-based industry projects focused on testing and developing technologies related to injection of CO2, water with different salinities, natural gas, hydrogen, and chemical in subsurface reservoirs. In addition, the successful candidate will contribute to supporting, supervising and mentoring the Centre’s PhD students. 

A multidisciplinary partnership, comprising of two UK universities (Heriot-Watt University and the University of Aberdeen), NHS Lothian (Western General Hospital), and NHS Grampian (Aberdeen Royal Infirmary) was recently awarded a research grant by the Chief Scientist Office (CSO) to undertake a 18-month research project and clinical study entitled ”Digital Camera-based Uroflowmetry: Early Diagnosis and Monitoring of Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms (LUTS) for Community and Home Use”. The vision of this engineering-clinical partnership is for a novel and transformative ‘Digital Health’ approach to how LUTS is diagnosed and monitored, with direct benefit to patients and clinical practice being the core outcome of the project. This research project offers exciting opportunities for a research associate (RA) to work together with the investigator team and clinical partners to develop this technology towards clinical use and commercialisation. 

The post holder will be based at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh) and will develop the digital health framework for real-time assessment of urinary flow dynamics, based on recorded video from the camera. Together with the multidisciplinary partnership team including engineers, clinicians, statisticians and research nurses, S/he will be expected to lead the research development of the proposed technology through planned clinical validation across two NHS hospitals involving 150-250 patients. They will attend and present research findings at internal project meetings and national/international conferences, and also contribute to the internal and external visibility of the research groups and publish scientific results arising from this project. It is expected that, during the project, significant intellectual properties (IPs) will be generated and realised through commercialisation and the post-holder will be encouraged to be involved and make contributions to such activities, if desired. 

A Post-Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) is needed for a research project, fully funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), initially for 12 months from 1st July 2023 or as soon as possible but can be extended depending on the availability of funding. 

The research project COG-MHEAR: Towards cognitively inspired 5G-IoT enabled, multi-modal Hearing Aids funded by UK research council (EPSRC), involves six academic partners including University of Edinburgh and industrial partners including Bell-Labs, Alcatel-Lucent Technologies, USA and Sonova AG. The research will explore and validate the new concept hearing-aid to transform hearing care by 2050, we aim to completely re-think the way HAs are designed. Our transformative approach – for the first time – draws on the cognitive principles of normal hearing. Listeners naturally combine information from both their ears and eyes: we use our eyes to help us hear. 

We will create “multi-modal” aids which not only amplify sounds but contextually use simultaneously collected information from a range of sensors to improve speech intelligibility. Adding in these new sensors and the processing that is required to make sense of the data produced will place a significant additional power and miniaturization burden on the HA device. We will need to make our sophisticated visual and sound processing algorithms operate with minimum power and minimum delay, and will achieve this by making dedicated hardware implementations, accelerating the key processing steps.