System Dynamics

The School of Civil Engineering (SCE) has a long track record in materials and structures with concrete technology, resilience and sustainability being research streams in which it pioneered and excelled. Linking with industrial partners and focusing on answering practical structural engineering problems, such as the ones originating from notorious failures, have always been major priorities within the School. Further a true multidisciplinary culture has developed through the years with substantial funding awards won towards unconventional cross-Faculty research work. Today the structural research portfolio in the SCE covers a wide band of topics including durability and monitoring of full-scale aging structures, developing novel control measures against natural disasters and optimisation of engineering designs even beyond the civil engineering boundaries. The common target of all such research is to uncover unknown interactions embedded within the nowadays very complex engineering systems in order to strengthen and widen fundamental engineering knowledge.

The School is currently procuring a Multi-Axis Shaking Table, supported by EPSRC, University and industrial funding. This is specifically scoped for interdisciplinary research on system dynamics with the expectation that it could be used for research across a diverse range of areas including earthquake engineering, soil-structure interaction, nuclear engineering, biomechanics, wind energy, hydraulic fracturing, composite materials, robotics and transport engineering. We aim to build national and international collaborations through open sharing of data and real-time, web-enabled, concurrent/hybrid experiments.

The school is seeking to appoint a UAF in system dynamics to further strengthen its position in the structures field. You would need to be an expert “dynamicist” engineer who has applied your work within a technical/engineering context. You will work with the existing structures research group in order to complement and broaden the skills base for developing a research programme beyond structural engineering in the broad area of dynamics of systems and complex time-dependent interaction phenomena. You will benefit from full capacity of the unique University resources with a particular focus on latest experimental research approaches. We would particularly encourage candidates with previous expertise in experimental dynamics/mechanics. You will initiate new research at the interfaces between disciplines and would devote time in instigating research collaborations and consortia that would lead to extensive EU and UK research proposals. Dynamic phenomena are essential to an understanding of structures and you would further have to contribute towards integrating state-of-the-art dynamic research into undergraduate and postgraduate teaching across campus.

The common vision of the School is to establish Leeds as one of the main structural dynamics academic institutions in the UK, and this UAF is specifically intended to serve and promote this vision. As such, you are expected to show clear potential and world-class features that could make a significant contribution to both research and teaching of dynamics beyond the SCE.

University Grade 8 (£38,511 to £45,954)

For informal enquiries about the role please contact Professor Cath Noakes, Director of Research, School of Civil Engineering, tel: +44 (0)113 343 2306, email: C.J.Noakes@leeds.ac.uk.

Ref: ENGCV1003

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