Course Structure

Royce Materials 4.0 CDT

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Royce is training a new generation of researchers in the digitalisation of materials science. Students will go on to work in UK academia and industry, applying their knowledge and skills to shorten the time materials take to reach market.

The core principle behind the training programme is to take students ‘from learners to leaders’ over the course of their studies. Bringing together high-throughput experimentation and modelling, big data and ML will transform materials science.

The Royce CDT will provide students with the necessary skills and training to become a new type of scientist working in materials. But the ambition is to build an even broader skills base for UK academia and industry. Students will begin by learning core skills, but as you develop proficiency and confidence you will play a role in training other students, both within and external to the CDT.

Research projects will focus on developing new methods and tools within Materials 4.0, and in the last two years of study you will develop training materials to support your work. This aims to further develop your abilities as a trainer and helping to disseminate your work and methodology. For students from industry or based with industrial projects this will offer a rapid route to impact for the training and new methods.

Cohort Training

Bringing together experts from across the country – scientists with different materials specialisms, experts in metrology, informatics, and machine learning – enables students to build up the range of skills required to become an expert applying your research to specific materials challenges.

Royce is keen for students to connect, converse, and collaborate with the other students across cohort, and with the students in other cohort years. Furthermore, we trust that your combined experience will add a richness to the training materials that they will help to develop for the wider community – a unique output of this CDT.

Structure

The training programme is structured to allow students to engage with their research projects immediately following the start of their studentships.

A residential induction will enable you to start buildings connections across your cohort, and networking with researchers and staff from across the Royce partners. This will then be followed by the early commencement of their research projects, student to establish links with their supervisors, host research groups, and industrial sponsors from the outset.

Year 1: Learner

Students will gain the basic knowledge and develop the core skills required for their transition to researchers. You will:

Receive primers, via online and in-person delivery, on all aspects of Materials 4.0.
Undertake training specific to your research project, developed by your supervisor/s with the support of the CDT management committee.
Undertake a first-year training on equality, diversity, inclusivity and access (EDIA), responsible research and innovation (RRI), sustainable research, and open and reproducible science; including completion of NPL’s Fundamentals of Metrology course.

Year 2: Trainee

Students will deepen their background knowledge and develop the skills necessary to pass on their learning. You will:

Undertake deep-dive training modules in the areas related to your project, chosen with the help of your supervisor.
Be trained as trainers, with classes on basic pedagogy, communication, and coaching.
Develop your own modules in a subject related to their research with the help of an academic mentor.

Year 3: Trainer

Students become involved in training the wider community of materials researchers from beyond the CDT, which will help them deepen their own subject-specific knowledge and hone their skills. You will:

Deliver data carpentry modules to get a first experience of training using well-established delivery methods and content.
Deliver the training modules that you have developed. You will be encouraged to reflect on the process and refine you material and delivery plan.
Organise and run workshops on aspects of Materials 4.0 for a variety of audiences from academia and industry.

Year 4: Leader

Students will grow into leaders and become advocates for the digitalisation of materials discovery and manufacturing in industry and academia. You will:

Organise and run the annual national conference in Materials 4.0, with the support of the CDT Manager and CDT academics.
Undertake an advocacy project, aimed at building support for adoption of Materials 4.0 best practice, focused on methods, tools, skills or culture.
Undertake skills modules on leadership, career options and employment readiness.

Course Elements

The training programme will consist of seven elements which form the structured programme described above. Each element is detailed below, along with examples:

1. Primer courses will cover all aspects of Materials 4.0 at an introductory level, so that you rapidly gain an appreciation for the scope and potential of digital aspects of materials science:

Introduction to Metrology
Digital Twins and the Digital Thread
Sensing and Control technology
Robotics
Machine learning in materials science
Importance of standards

2. Core-skills courses will provide you with the personal toolkit required to conduct research in your chosen field. These courses will be drawn from existing Software and Data Carpentry modules and existing courses at the centre partners and elsewhere:

Basic Programming
Data Analysis and Visualisation
Introduction to Machine Learning
Research Data Management
Experimental Design
Bayesian Statistics
Uncertainty Quantification

3. Deep-dive courses will take your understanding of aspects of Materials 4.0 to a deeper level and to the current frontier of knowledge. These courses, from which you will take a selection, will ensure your readiness for further research. In later years, these courses will include student-created training content, built by previous cohorts in their second year:

Sensing and control feedback in additive manufacturing
Multi-fidelity approaches in materials characterisation
High-throughput simulation for materials design

4. Project-specific training focused on techniques will be curated by each supervisory team to provide you with expert skills and to facilitate equipment access required for your research. Supervisors will also arrange attendance on suitable taught modules to cover background knowledge in the area of your research. This element will be optimised to your individual course of study, with oversight from the CDT management board. Typical elements for a CDT project may be:

Advanced taught modules on 2D materials and machine learning
Training in electron microscopy

5. Inter-cohort workshops and seminars will address emerging themes at the cutting edge of Materials 4.0. These events, held at the Royce Hub Building in Manchester and other venues, will be co-created by you as part of your student cohort in areas of interest to the group. Examples might include:

Ethics of AI
Reproducibility in materials science

6. Professional skills training will cover topics relevant across STEM fields and essential to the modern practice of materials science. These topics include, but are not limited to:

Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)
Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)
Environmental Sustainability (ES)

Student-led elements of the course will also address key career skills such as:

Science communication
Project management
Negotiation and leadership
Employability

These will be covered in detail as part of the annual workshop that the Isaac Newton Institute (INI) will run for the CDT each year. Commercialisation training will be provided by the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC).

7. A national conference in Materials 4.0 will be organised and run each year by 4^th-year students. This will offer junior cohorts opportunities to present their research and allow senior cohorts to gain experience in academic event organisation and acting as session chairs. The conference will feature plenary talks from industrial researchers and internationally renowned academics and, in later years, graduates from the CDT.

This approach is based on the following principles:

Making face-to-face interaction count: With student cohorts spread across the country, the time you spend together will be rarer than for other CDTs. We will make use of the in-person time for activities which face-to-face interaction is genuinely needed.
Developing inter-cohort relationships: Interaction between cohorts will be key to ensuring students develop strong support networks. But more than this, inter-cohort activities provide a mechanism for students to develop as coaches and leaders.
Exploiting Royce’s national reach: The CDT partners have a full range of expertise covering Materials 4.0. All elements of the training programme will be delivered by the partner with the appropriate expertise. For example:
- Sheffield (cyber-physical systems)
- NPL (standards of metrology)
- ATI (Sustainable/Responsible AI)
- Cambridge (Machine Learning)
- Strathclyde (industrial-scale digitalised manufacturing)
Building professional skills development into the structure of the CDT: We want students to grow as leaders, developing strong organisational, communication and advocacy skills, so that they can become ambassadors for digital materials, disseminating new ways of working across the discipline.

Methods

Delivery of the CDT training will exploit a variety of traditional and more modern learning formats. By ensuring that face-to-face interactions are intense, focused, and clearly scheduled, and by embracing proven approaches to remote learning we will widen participation in the CDT to a more diverse group of students.

Delivery modes:

Face-to-face, cross-CDT: Each year will feature four, quarterly periods of face-to-face activity hosted by the CDT partners. 1st-year students will attend all four sessions, 2nd and 3rd-year students will attend three sessions and the 4th years, two sessions…
Face-to-face, small group: Subsets of students, from multiple partners and cohorts, will come together at other points in the calendar for scheduled training and for activities driven and organised by the students themselves (e.g., focused workshops).
Online synchronous: Some material is better delivered remotely and so some training will be delivered by gathering online.
Online asynchronous: Learning often proceeds best when conducted at a student’s own pace and the Royce CDT team has plenty of experience of supporting asynchronous learning via approaches like flipped learning.

The Royce CDT will facilitate multiple pathways to engagement:

Traditional: full-time engagement, university based
PhD at Work: full-time engagement, based at sponsor
Part-time traditional: Students based in universities will be able to follow the programme on a part-time basis over up to 8 years
Part-time, in industry: Partner organisations will have the option of releasing existing staff members to complete the programme on a part-time basis over up to 8 years

Students on a part-time pathway will be expected to complete all the first-year training activity in their first year, to properly embed them in the CDT community, but the programmes for years 2-4 can be completed at a slower pace corresponding to the student’s duration of study.

Assessment

You will be assessed annually in accordance with the progression process at the individual host institution. You will also be assessed for successful engagement with taught elements of the course and your active participation in CDT cohort training activities. A positive assessment will be a condition of your annual progression at your host institution.

Final assessment will be based on a written report and a viva examination with an independent assessor external to your supervisory team.