Thirty-seven UQ postgraduate engineering students showcased their work at the recent 2010 Postgraduate Student Conference held at UQ St Lucia campus.
The conference was a collaboration between the UQ’s School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering and School of Civil Engineering and featured 37 presentations addressing an extensive engineering research topics such as materials processing, robotics, computerised mapping, earthquake damage prevention, pipeline buckling, hypersonics and spacecraft re-entry.
More than 60 postgraduate students, academic staff and industry representatives attended the annual student conference.
PhD student and conference organiser, Aleks Atrens, said the conference this year was organised by a committee of five postgraduate students and that they were keen to use the opportunity to engage all postgraduate engineering disciplines in one event.
“There are limited opportunities for postgraduate students like us to present research to our peers in a conference setting and so this provided an important platform for us (students) to share our work in the engineering community and learn from the experience,” Mr Atrens said.
“For this year, we wanted to make the conference engaging for the audience by encouraging the audience to provide feedback on individual presentations to help students to improve on their personal skills and research work.
“We have had a lot of positive feedback about this conference, and look forward to seeing the conference grow into an even greater event next year.”
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology (EAIT) Associate Dean (Research) Professor Justin Cooper-White congratulated the conference organisers and highlighted the importance of providing professional development opportunities, such as speaking at professional conferences, to EAIT postgraduates.
”We talk about encouraging students to develop their skills in avenues beyond traditional research and allowing students to take charge of a conference is one effective way of doing this,” Professor Cooper-White said.
Five prizes were awarded to students who excelled in their presentations, a special acknowledgment was made for the best journal paper in Mechanical and Mining Engineering in 2009-2010, and “The Professor John Simmons Prize” was awarded for the best thesis in Mechanical, Mining, or Materials Engineering.
Conference organisers were Aleks Atrens, Chetan Chodankar, Ali Habibi, Jurij Karlovsek and Rajinesh Singh.
Media: Aleks Atrens aleks.atrens@uq.edu.au or Izzy Koh from the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology (07 3346 7696 or i.koh@uq.edu.au
