SHELL AT ICL long-term, fundamental research into fuels and lubricants on Shell’s behalf. The work is managed in a very concerted manner with the Research Manager spending two to three days a week at Imperial College, and there are frequent visits by the Shell supervisors of the six PhD students the Shell UTC currently funds. Besides these postgraduate students, there is also support for several postdoctoral researchers, as well as others working under Cooperative Awards in Science and Technology from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. “What makes the UTC so effective – and why it delivers something that could not be delivered solely in-house – is the combination of a strong group of postgraduate students bursting with ideas and enthusiasm working alongside Professor Spikes, Professor Dini and many other academics in the Tribology Group, plus the team’s intimate links with Shell’s technology organisation. Significantly, there are continual interactions between the UTC and Shell’s more product-oriented lubricant laboratories in Hamburg, Houston and Shanghai.”
the help of his contacts throughout the fuels and lubricants organisations, and to drive the work (for example, to come up with suitable PhD projects) in the directions set by Shell’s fuels and lubricants innovation hubs.
new set of PhD & post-doc projects are in the pipeline to start in 2018 and every year thereafter. If you are interested in pursuing a PhD with the UTC, be sure to keep an eye out for future announcements.
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Taking Collaborative Research to the Next Level.
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Initiating the right projects is not, however, the biggest challenge: “I have to think constantly about extracting the value from the work done at UTC and to stop the work going off at tangents. Of course, I have help with this in the form of the Shell research supervisors. It is all about control and monitoring, in the best possible sense, without being overbearing. Together, we spend a good deal of time keeping up to speed with exactly what the students are doing, presenting internally and planning to publish. Crucially, it is not the students’ role to identify commercial opportunities arising from their work. That is my main job,” Neal stresses.
Critical to the success of the UTC is the relationship Neal has with the college academics, his colleagues, Thanks to continuing success, the and his students. His job is to pro- agreement for the UTC was revide business input to the UTC, with cently extended out to 2022 and a
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