As an international university college, SBC believes that academic excellence goes beyond classroom teaching. Our academics have been actively involved in research through collaboration with colleagues at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST) and the UK partner universities. The most recent achievement is evidenced in an award won by two academics in the Engineering team at SBC and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), one of SBC's nine leading partner universities in the UK.
The Nuclear Security Network (NuSec) is a UK institution which was set-up with the aim of preventing the illegal transport of nuclear material. Recently, a call was issued to academia European-wide for research proposals into detectors. Dr Peter Claiden, Senior Lecturer in Engineering at SBC and Professor James Ren from the Department of Maritime and Mechanical Engineering at LJMU jointly submitted a proposal. The submission came 3rd out of 13 applicants and was therefore awarded a research contract due to start in July 2016.
The work is about research into the detection of nuclear contraband in shipping containers and lorries and will involve an LJMU PhD student attending SBC during the summer and being supervised by SBC staff.
Following the successful completion of this work, it is hoped that it will lead to specific research outputs and, in turn, further funding given the significance of the research to various stakeholders, illustrated, for example, in its relevance to public safety, public policy, regulation and private sector business development in general and the nuclear industry in particular.
In the past few years, research publications and conference papers have been published internationally by SBC academics on a wide range of subjects, including use of ultrasound, turbulence control, data mining and Nano technology. It is believed that the recent achievement will be tremendous for the College both academically and reputationally.
Dr Peter Claiden said: "I'm glad that our research initiative has been highly recognised in the international academia. All year I have been supervising one of our top students in a Final Year Project using data from a Professor at USST. She has now handed in an excellent and highly recommended thesis that can be the basis for a journal publication. Thanks to the unique collaborative model of SBC, staff and students are offered excellent opportunities for making use of the resources available not only within the College but also in the partner universities in supporting their work."
