Welcome from Professor Clive Roberts

Hello, I'm Professor Clive Roberts, Head of the School of Engineering at the University of Birmingham.

It's disappointing are unable to invite you on the campus at this time, but to make up for this we have prepared a series of online videos and ways that you can interact with us so you can understand more about our courses, the research we do, and our overall facilities that we have at the University of Birmingham.

During the shutdown period. It's been a busy time for us, making sure that as existing students education is not disrupted and those students that are finishing their courses congratulate.

We've also been busy undertaking vital research for the NHS and for industry, for example, we've been developing methods to print 3D equipment for the NHS and political care workers. And also we've been working with public transport companies to make sure that their services can continue to operate during the shutdown and passengers can start to reuse those facilities as we're allowed to use and move around the country more.

The next year is going to be a busy time for us. We have a new 86 million pound School of Engineering opening early in 2021. This will bring together the Department of Civil Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering into a state of the art facility. I believe the best in the UK.

The building also houses the unique National Centres of Excellence, For example the National Buried Infrastructure Facility. This is a facility is one other in the world that enables us to be able to look at how utilities are buried under the earth and the roads of pavements under cities.

And how we can both install those sorts of equipment and and how we can also inspect utilities once they've been installed.

We also will open the UK research and innovation network National Center of Excellence in digital systems. This working with Network Rail HS to Siemens Bombardier and Tanis a large number of other industrial companies. And will be working there on how we can digitise the UK round system to both improve the experience of passages in the UK, but also to be able to export that technology around the world.

On our education front, we will continue to work industry to improve the employability, we already have a very, very high employability rate from all our engineering programmes. But in particular will be working with Siemens and network route to look at how we can embed their engineers into our courses more and how they can more directly employed and engage with our graduates.

In the research area. We have a number of new initiative starting very, very exciting work. For example, in the work area space, whether we've got new projects to work with MET The MET office to understand how we can measure and predict using either existing data or new data from technology that we developed how space weather or develop and how that will affect us here on Earth.

We also have large project with big infrastructure companies to look at how we can build IT infrastructure more efficiently, how we can make it resilient to extreme weather and how we can begin to create an automated and inspection and automated construction in our civil engineering areas.  And work on decarbonisation both an alternative engine and also in railway areas and proceed and we have work on more electric vehicles using battery technologies and hydrogen.  And in those sorts of traction systems in order to decarbonise those those systems.

This is all important and exciting research and feed over onto our teaching and learning activities. So, Welcome again. Again, apologies that were unable to see you in person on campus, but do please use all the facilities, you have to ask questions. It's important, you're able to understand what we do and ask the queries that you may have.

Do feel free to contact staff and myself to ask all that and find out about the things you want to know, and I look forward to seeing you soon on campus in Birmingham. Thank you very much.