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Ireland Canada University Foundation (ICUF) Dobbin Scholarship Awarded to Roisin McConnell

Roisin McConnell who is in the first year of her PhD in the school, has been selected by the Board of the ICUF to receive The Sir George Quigley Memorial Bursary generously sponsored by Bombardier Aerospace.  This bursary valued at €4,200, is one of several ICUF Scholarships which fund visits of up to four weeks to benefit the recipient’s research, establish new or build on existing academic links between Canada and Ireland and provide the opportunity for the development of ongoing links in their research area.  The awards are designed principally for scholars and academics who are either beginning or are currently engaged at graduate level research in a discipline which is, or has potential to be, related to both Ireland and Canada.

Roisin’s PhD is entitled ‘Immersive VR Environments for Spatial Design in Aerospace Product Development’. She will use the bursary to travel to Bombardier Aerospace in Canada to develop her PhD and validate her research which has a desktop, immersive virtual reality system at its core.  Her project is an important strand of the ongoing research in the Aerospace and Manufacturing cluster where her work will build capability and understanding around the question of how multi-national collaborative design and manufacturing programmes can reduce costs and improve quality levels. This linkage between design and manufacture remains a major challenge within industry where virtual environments and tools remain underutilised in day to day engineering development tasks.

The bursary presents an excellent opportunity for Roisin to present her work to an international audience - she is looking forward to her trip!!  Her Phd is jointly supervised by Dr Joe Butterfield and Prof Mark Price (School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) and Dr Karen Rafferty (School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science).  For more information contact: j.butterfield@qub.ac.uk.

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