NAMRIP PhD student wins Best Paper award at major international conference in her first year
Maryam Malakoutikhah, a first year NAMRIP PhD student, won Best Paper award at the IEEE sponsored International Conference for Students on Applied Engineering (ICSAE 2016), which this year was held in Newcastle Upon Tyne, from 20 to 21 October.
This annual conference, which will be held in Hong Kong next year, selects ~100 presentations by students who have shown a flair and passion for Applied Engineering, but only one of these receives the award. Maryam, whose supervisors are Professors Timothy Leighton and Bill Keevil, is being sponsored by an industry CASE award jointly funded by EPSRC and Ultrawave Ltd, and is looking into technology to improve the performance of StarStream, which will require her not only to apply her engineering skills, but also to learn the microbiology necessary to the AMR goals of her work. These two skills reflect the fact that her supervisors come from two different faculties. Her award-winning paper, entitled: ‘Accurate heat loss evaluation of water-cooled electric motors using a differential ultrasonic calorimeter’, describes work done with the University of Nottingham and Sheffield Hallam University.
Maryam said: "it was an exciting and challenging experience and I very much appreciated the input of my co authors. Also, the presentation training session which NAMRIP provided gave me lots of useful advice from NAMRIP members on specific ways in which I could improve the presentation, and lessons I can use for future presentations."
We are thrilled with Maryam. I first met her at our NAMRIP launch conference in December 2015 – she had come down to Southampton, on her own volition, to find out more about ‘this NAMRIP thing’ that she had heard about. Now, less than a year later, we have a prize-winning researcher on our hands – she is throwing herself into the task of engineering even better performance into StarStream to combat AMR and promote Infection Prevention. It is a great example of the EPSRC Network funding allowing us to build something in NAMRIP that we can be so proud of, and then attracting external funds from industry, and wonderful researchers like Maryam, to carry NAMRIP into the future
Notes for editors
NAMRIP is funded by the University of Southampton and benefits hugely from £868,704.00 of funding from EPSRC's Network for Antimicrobial Action 'Bridging the Gap' call [EP/MO27260/1].