Last week in Brussels officials of the Research Executive Agency, the European Commission body created to foster excellence in research and innovation, greeted the coordinators of recently awarded Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) projects with warmth and enthusiasm: ‘Congratulations, you are sitting here today because you are the best in Europe’. The University of Nottingham, through the IESSG, was one of the privileged few to be in that room.
The Marie Curie ITNs are part of the FP7 People Programme and aim to ‘improve the career perspectives of researchers who are in the first five years of their research career, in both public and private sectors’. The IESSG, with the TRANSMIT project, was one of the 63 organizations (out of 863 applicants in the 2009 call) selected to lead one of such exciting and prestigious networks. TRANSMIT stands for ‘Training Research and Applications Network to Support the Mitigation of Ionospheric Threats’ and comprises a consortium of leading universities and research centres in Europe, with associated partners from top European industry stakeholders, as well as industry and academia from as far as Brazil and Canada. It kicks off in February 2011 and will provide a coordinated training programme in an area of immediate interest to European society.
TRANSMIT will recruit 13 young researchers to deal with the main threat to the reliable and safe operation of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as GPS and Galileo, that is the variable propagation conditions encountered by the satellites signals as they pass through the Earth’s upper atmosphere (the ionosphere). The ionosphere delays the signals causing positioning errors, but more importantly can lead to sudden rapid signal fading and operational outages. These intermittent problems have limited the expansion of the GNSS market in mission-critical high-precision applications such as air, rail and marine transport and even autonomous machinery in areas such as agriculture. With the current development of Galileo, in Europe there is a need for a new generation of researchers, who are trained with ionospheric expertise directly connected to their GNSS knowledge. TRANSMIT will provide this integrated programme of academic and industrial training. This is particularly timely for European Society as we both build our own GNSS system and approach the next solar maximum.
Full partners in TRANSMIT are: University of Nottingham, Politecnico di Torino, Polish Academy of Sciences, Technische Universitaet Berlin, University of Bath, University of Nova Gorica, University of Zagreb, German Aerospace Center, IEEA SARL, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia
Associate partners in TRANSMIT are: AXIO-NET GmbH, Consiglio Nazionale di Geometri e Geometri Laureati, EISCAT Scientific Association, Fugro Intersite B.V., International Center for Theoretical Physics, Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, National Council of Researches, Petrobras Petróleo Brasileiro S.A., Pildo Consulting S.L., Septentrio N.V., Spirent Communications plc, Thales Alenia Space Italia S.p.A, University of Leicester, University of New Brunswick, Sao Paulo State University Presidente Prudente