Prestigious Fellowship for Nottingham Researcher

An outstanding University of Nottingham researcher has been awarded a prestigious fellowship worth £563,000, to help develop his potential as one of the best young engineers of his generation. Dr Riccardo Briganti has won a Career Acceleration Fellowship from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to fund his research over the next five years. The fellowships are a direct investment in Britain’s most talented researchers to help them tackle major global challenges such as climate change and sustainable energy.

Dr Briganti’s area of expertise is in modelling coastal physical processes and their interaction with coastal defence structures. He has been working for three years in the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Research Centre at the University of Nottingham, a worldleading research group led by Professor Nicholas Dodd. With his Fellowship, Dr Briganti aims at improving significantly the capabilities of numerical models to support the design of coastal defences from floods and erosion. He will focus on modelling the response of the structures to physical phenomena that act simultaneously at different spatial scales.

Announcing the new fellowships, David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, said: “Supporting talented scientists and engineers throughout their careers is crucial to driving the UK’s

science base and economy forward.“These prestigious fellowships are an important investment for the future, and will help us develop innovative technologies and solutions for the major challenges ahead, and secure our place as global winners.”

Dr Briganti said: “Coastal flooding affects the life of millions of people in the UK and worldwide. Therefore there is an urgent need for cost-effective, efficient, and durable coastal defences. Only by improving our capability of modelling the complex interaction between coastal flows and these structures, we will be able, as engineers, to meet this challenge. This is exactly the aim of my research within the Fellowship.”

Successful Fellows must have a strong record of published research and be able to demonstrate independence from their supervisors. Full details on the new EPSRC fellowships can be found at:

http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/fellows/Pages/default.aspx