The Leverhulme Trust recently funded a Doctoral Scholarships programme on Mathematics for A Sustainable Society (MASS), which aims to use mathematics to help tackle the ongoing global problems of food shortages, water scarcity and insufficient clean energy, through predictive modelling and statistical analysis.
On 4 November 2015 we held a launch meeting to raise awareness of the programme among staff and students. Timothy Whiteley, attendee at the event, comments:
"The Leverhulme doctoral launch event was a great success and a useful time to share ideas concerning how mathematics can be a useful tool for building a sustainable future. After a good networking session, Markus Owen, the head of the MASS programme, explained the role of MASS within the university. The aim is to bring together new PhD students and researchers from different disciplines in order to combine everybody’s expertise and develop a cohesive approach to issues of sustainability by using mathematical modelling as a tool. It will cover 4 main areas of sustainability- food, energy, water and society and to use mathematical modelling to try to understand and ultimately tackle some of the main areas. The current cohort are researching such areas as water purification, organic solar cell technology, managing water resources and modelling urban resource flow.
Throughout the afternoon we listened to some interesting talks from external leaders in various fields. It was kicked off by hearing about food security in an increasing global population and the complexities of modelling it. We heard about the surprisingly drastic effects that food insecurity causes in the world and discussing potential ideas for how the research community can tackle these going forward. The next talk explained how we can use an agent based approach to model a more sustainable lifestyle and some potential ways that this may be implemented in the future. After a short talk on funding from the ESPRC, the last talk was on the importance of modelling water usage and the difficulties associated. He went on to explain how smart water meters can be installed so that we can create better models to map water usage and encourage greater efficiency of water use.
Overall, there were useful connections made and it opened up different avenues of discussion and debate regarding current ideas and research into various sustainability issues".
The full Launch Meeting programme of events:
Wednesday 4 November (12.00 - 16.00) - Sir Clive Granger Building, A40
- 1200-1300: Lunch (Sir Clive Granger Foyer)
- 1300-1320: Introduction - Markus Owen (Director, Mathematics for A Sustainable Society)
- 1320-1400: Tim Benton (UK Champion for Global Food Security; Professor of Population Ecology, School of Biology, University of Leeds) - "Models and grand challenges: from philosophy via practicality to policy"
- 1400-1440: Liz Varga (Director, Complex Systems Research Centre, Cranfield School of Management) - "Agent based modelling: toward sustainable lifestyles"
- 1440-1510: Coffee & networking
- 1510-1520:Philippa Hemmings (EPSRC) - "EPSRC, Mathematical Sciences and Living With Environmental Change"
- 1520-1600: Dragan Savic (Professor of Hydroinformatics, University of Exeter) - "Hydroinformatics in the age of big data and even bigger water management challenges”
Posted on Tuesday 17th November 2015