07 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

A Post-Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) is needed for a research project, fully funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), initially for 12 months from 1st July 2023 or as soon as possible but can be extended depending on the availability of funding. 

The research project COG-MHEAR: Towards cognitively inspired 5G-IoT enabled, multi-modal Hearing Aids funded by UK research council (EPSRC), involves six academic partners including University of Edinburgh and industrial partners including Bell-Labs, Alcatel-Lucent Technologies, USA and Sonova AG. The research will explore and validate the new concept hearing-aid to transform hearing care by 2050, we aim to completely re-think the way HAs are designed. Our transformative approach – for the first time – draws on the cognitive principles of normal hearing. Listeners naturally combine information from both their ears and eyes: we use our eyes to help us hear. 

IBioIC are seeking to appoint a full-time Senior Fermentation Scientist / Manager for a period of 5 years who will be responsible for management of the fermentation (Upstream Bioprocessing) projects that are performed within the FlexBio (The Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre’s (IBioIC) Bioprocessing Scale-up facility within the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences (EPS) and within the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Biophysics and Bioengineering (IB3).  

The role will be partly lab and partly office based and primarily involves ensuring fermentation and scale-up projects are conducted for industry and academic clients in a safe, professional, timely and organised manner. The role holder is expected to work with the wider Scale-up team (including downstream processing team), facility manager and IBioIC management team to ensure the Scale-up facility facilitates the commercialisation of biotechnology projects and company from lab scale to pilot scale using a fee-for-service model of operation. 

EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship roles are funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of Heriot-Watt University’s Doctoral Training Partnership award. 

The EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship scheme is intended to help universities recruit and retain the best newly qualified doctoral (e.g.PhD, EngD) students, and help them launch careers in research.

Doctoral Prize Fellowship scheme, the Innovation Expert (INE) post holders will work on projects within the EPSRC remit with focus on the development of impactful, mathematics-driven innovation in varied areas of science and technology. INEs will interface between different areas of EPSRC remit, working on specific projects within the Centre for Mathematics-Driven Innovation (M-DICE), aiming to address industrial and/or applied sciences challenges by employing cutting-edge mathematical and statistical modelling. 

The Research Associate will work within the HAPiWEC team at the Edinburgh campus of Heriot-Watt University.  They will be expected to develop and test the control engineering control algorithms in both software and wave tank environments, which will be a key deliverable of the project.  The control algorithms will be made openly available and easily tunable through software, developed by the Research Associate in collaboration with the HAPiWEC software engineer. An essential feature of the project is to allow future control algorithm developers to test their algorithms with the a step-change in speed.  The Research Associate will need to collaborate closely with the rest of the HAPiWEC team to turn the research outputs into usable software code that is sharable with and usable by a diverse range of target audiences. The Research Associate will also need excellent inter-personal skills to lead on communication with the external participants in the HAPiWEC programme. 

We are looking for a highly experienced and skilled PDRA who will work on the EPSRC (Part of the UK national research council) projects EP/V051164/1/1 “Developing Machine Learning-empowered Responsive Manufacture of Industrial Laser Systems“ and EP/Y017307/1 “Autonomous and Intelligent Laparoscopy Trainer with Real-Time Feedback”. The former project aims to develop new automated robotic processes for the assembly and manufacture of industrial laser systems taking advantage of the latest research in robotics and machine learning. The PDRA will be responsible for developing machine learning techniques to automate laser alignment and assembly of optical pieces. A fundamental challenge in building optical laser systems is alignment of pieces, which typically requires high skills and much time. An automated mechatronic system can embed machine intelligence inspired from human expert performances. The PDRA will be responsible for developing the machine intelligence for automation, search and optimization algorithms. The latter project aims to develop an automated laparoscopy training system, which can provide feedback to the trainees. The task of the PDRA in this second project will be to develop machine intelligence to classify and categorize videos of expert and novice performances and to develop the video streaming setup to retract, embed, and visualize relevant videos at the same time and on top of each other.  

Mental health represents, globally, a priority for public health organizations, policy makers, patients and citizens. The mental illnesses’ diagnosis and decision processes are still uncertain and inconsistent especially in a fast-evolving real world where stressors affect people in different ways. This understanding is key to developing mental health services and outstanding policies that are more responsive to the cultural and social contexts and inclusive towards vulnerable people. SMILE aims to improve the quality of self-assessment, learning, and clinical practices and ensure affordable services by sharing evidence-based knowledge, providing scalable digital tools, and ensuring personalized decision-making and interventions in an effective way.