A further expansion of Loughborough’s strategic research capability in Systems Engineering was secured through an EPSRC award by EPSRC for a new Engineering Doctorate Centre in Systems Engineering. The Engineering Doctorate (EngD) is a four-year postgraduate award representing a radical alternative to the traditional PhD. It is better suited to the needs of industry and provides a more vocationally-oriented doctorate in engineering, with the Research Engineers spending around three-quarters of their time working directly with their collaborating company.

The Systems Engineering Doctorate Centre (SEDC) is located at Loughborough, and takes the form of a consortium with four other universities (Bath, Queen’s Belfast, Leicester and Strathclyde) and a number of industry organisations. A key industry partner is BAE Systems, which further strengthens the collaboration with Loughborough, but a number of other industry partners are already “signed up” to the EngD Centre to provide a wide industrial support base including defence, aerospace, automotive, shipbuilding, power generation and process control.

Professor Roger Goodall from the Electronic and Electrical Engineering department, the SEDC’s inaugural Director, commented “This new activity provides systems engineering research opportunities for a number of departments across the campus. Loughborough already has one EngD Centre (in Innovative Construction Engineering), and this new success helps to underpin Loughborough’s reputation for collaborative, industrially-relevant research.”