LEAD SUPERVISOR NAME: Dr Tao Chen

FUNDING STATUS: Directly Funded Project (Students Worldwide)

RESEARCH GROUP: Centre for Environmental Strategy

PROJECT DESCRIPTION 

The University of Surrey, in collaboration with Unilever, is pleased to announce an exciting opportunity to join the Practitioner Doctorate in Sustainability programme. Hosted by the internationally acclaimed Centre for Environmental Strategy, the Practitioner Doctorate in Sustainability programme is the first of its kind, offering talented and ambitious researchers a unique experience in collaborative research spanning industry and academia.

It is estimated that about 1/3 of the world’s food production is wasted. In developed countries, much of the wastage occurs in product manufacture, storage, distribution and consumption. This project aims to develop advanced heat and mass transfer models to achieve reduced wastage and energy use in food manufacture, storage and distribution. The research will focus on two high energy consuming product areas: ice cream, and tea-based beverages. The project will directly address sustainability issues in food engineering systems by the development of advanced heat-mass transfer models, through a multi-physics and multi-scale life cycle thinking approach interacting with product microstructure and property change. Predictive tools will be developed to select the most resource-efficient value chains from formulation through manufacturing and storage to distribution. New methods will be investigated and developed (multi-scale life cycle thinking methods, multi-physics methods, combined with meta-modelling) at the leading edge of new scientific methods of supercomputing. The developed technologies are fundamentally generic and can subsequently be further adapted to other areas within the food and drink industry.

Applications are invited from self-motivated, confident and enthusiastic candidates with exceptional critical and innovative thinking. Candidates should have a first degree in Chemical Engineering (at least a 2:1) or another relevant discipline and will demonstrate substantial mathematical and quantitative modelling skills. Candidates must demonstrate (at least) a basic knowledge of sustainability (in-depth training will be given) with clear enthusiasm to work in ‘sustainability’. Having considered the Project Brief (available upon request), candidates should outline the relevance of their own experience(s) in their covering letter.

FUNDING NOTES

The successful candidate will receive a generous stipend of £18,000 per annum throughout this time. Stipends are usually tax-free and DPs will also benefit from an additional £500 p.a. allowance for attendance at conferences etc. In addition to this, full-time tuition fees will be covered at the current Home/EU rate for the duration of the programme (international students will be expected to self-fund additional fees).

REFERENCES

To apply for this project, please contact k.boazman<στο>surrey.ac.uk for an information pack, which will include:

• A Project Brief

• Details of the Practitioner Doctorate in Sustainability programme

• An application form

This project is due to begin on the 13th of April 2015 and the successful candidate will be based in Guildford until the 3rd of July 2015, after which he/she will be based at Unilever’s R&D Centre in Colworth, Bedford. The programme will run for four years.

Interviews for this post are expected to take place in Bedford on the 20^th or 23^rd March 2015 (still tbc) and the deadline for applications is 23:59 on the 12^th March 2015.