Season’s greetings and wishing you a safe and healthy 2017. This is the final newsletter from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation for 2016, which affords the opportunity to look back and reflect on our achievements and impact to date. We’ve got some interesting news in this edition including our sponsorship of the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures to be shown on the BBC, plus an update on our latest Foresight Review in the field of Energy Storage. Looking back, 2016 has been a packed and fulfilling year for the Foundation. We awarded some major grants in areas including resilience engineering and public understanding of risk, plus we’ve also welcomed some new members of staff to the team. Looking forward, 2017 promises to be equally as exciting. As a charitable Foundation we exist for the benefit to society, so next year we will be publishing our first impact report that will showcase some examples of our achievements and social impact to date. At the end of the day the success of the Foundation belongs to all of us, so I want to express my thanks and once again wish everybody a Happy New Year.
Best wishes, Richard
ESRC Awarded to our grant holder
Dr Arnab Majumdar and his PhD Student Elena Psyllou from LRF Transport Risk Management Centre at Imperial College London have been awarded an ESRC impact grant on the application of Elena’s PhD results on airspace infringements - to be used in Norway, Finland and possibly Switzerland. The award is for £60,600 and is for 1 year from January 2017. This is great news for Elena - coming on top of the recognition she received from the judges for her poster at our international conference in October this year.
Ri Christmas Lectures
The Lloyd’s Register Foundation will be the major supporter of the Royal Institution’s 2016 Christmas lectures, which have been inspiring children and adults since 1825. This year, Professor Saiful Islam (University of Bath) will present “Supercharged: Fuelling the future,” the 2016 Christmas lectures on energy. The shows will be broadcast on BBC Four on 26, 27 and 28 December at 8pm and will be made available online soon after. Excitingly, our partnership though all of 2017 will further support teachers and students through face-to-face education initiatives and continuing professional development sessions for teachers, plus we will reach an international audience through a range of engaging online programmes inspired by the lectures.
Additive Manufacturing Roadmap
Help us to target the right things. One of the recommendations of our foresight review in structural integrity and systems performance was the safe application of additive manufacturing for safety critical systems. Our first step in this direction has been to issue a consultation document that outlines our thinking and a roadmap to what we should do. We are seeking your input by the end of January 2017 to understand if we have got this right or need to modify our roadmap. We are also starting to look for partners to bring the roadmap to life!
Energy storage review
Our next Foresight Review is underway.
The next foresight review that will be published by the Foundation will be on the topic of Energy Storage. A grant has been awarded a grant to Professor Nigel Brandon of Imperial College London to develop this foresight review. On 1 and 2 November, Nigel brought together a cross-section of international experts to explore how energy storage can provide threats and opportunities to safety. The workshop had representatives from academia, industry, regulators and government. The foresight review will be published early 2017.
Distributed ledgers workshop
In the last newsletter we introduced the work that we are doing through The Alan Turing Institute on creating a better societal understanding of distributed ledger and blockchain technologies and working with the community to explore where they may be of use.
The Alan Turing Institute will be holding a workshop to explore this area on 31 January 2017. To find out more about the event see here or to express an interest in taking part contact Gary Pogson
Safety Grand Challenges
Our Safety Grand Challenges campaign has already received great feedback indicating how safety is compromised at the point where people interact with critical infrastructure and also where the safety of critical infrastructure is in itself compromised. Keep sending your ideas here.
Regional summaries of Foundation grants
Want to find out more about the work we fund around the world? You can now download summaries of our grants portfolio by region: United Kingdom; Europe, the Middle-East and Africa; the Americas; and Asia and Australia.
New starters in the Heritage & Education Centre
The Foundation recently welcomed two new additions to the Heritage & Education Centre (HEC) team to assist with our digitisation project, Project Undaunted. Miles Deverson, Archives and Collections Assistant and Nicole Monjeau, Project Undaunted Assistant Conservator.
Miles is jointly responsible for cataloguing the ship plans and survey reports and Nicole is going to be working on stabilising and conserving (where necessary) part of the HEC collection ready for its digitisation. We wish them every success in their new roles.
Upcoming
NSIRC Open Research Call
The National Structural Integrity Research Centre (NSIRC) has launched an open research call. To find out more see here