Category: Transdisciplinary research

Giving textile waste and dyes a second chance

Following on our blogs exploring circular economy and zero waste, we welcome our new guest blogger, Dr. Antonio Ovejero-Perez. A postdoc from the Department of Chemical Engineering, Antonio’s research is focused on extracting dyes from textiles waste. 

Who hasn’t heard a family member say: “Back in the day, I only got new clothing for Christmas or birthday”? Now, in our fast-paced world things have changed. How many times a year do we buy clothes? Trends come and go quickly, and “fast fashion” has become more and more popular. 

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Interdisciplinary education leads to increased earnings

“Greater exposure to interdisciplinarity—especially for science majors—is associated with increased earnings after college graduation.” This is one of the conclusions of an article on interdisciplinary education by Han et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published in 2023.

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Academic-industry partnerships: risk, money, ideas and skills

One of the fun things I have to do in my job is find ways to increase collaborative research between IMSE and commercial companies. This is complicated. Research is risky, it’s expensive, it’s built on constantly generating new ideas, and this only happens with the right mix of the right people. How can we make all of this happen? One of the ways is with big collaborative research projects which are part-funded by industry and partly by public investment. In this post, I look at how this works.

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The next generation: tech, people and skills

It may sound like a cliché these days to hear people describe some new piece of technology as ‘next generation’. But here at IMSE, we’re working on the convergent science that underpins those kinds of technologies. And on our Master’s course, we’re training the people who will invent and develop these next generation technologies, and the manufacturing processes for them too. On 23rd June this year, we got to hear from our current cohort of 12 MRes students about progress on their research projects. It’s a great day for IMSE every year to see our students putting the IMSE approach into practice!

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