IRNAS PhD Partnership Scheme

At IRNAS we believe that even geographical distribution of knowledge will be of extremely high importance in the future. The best way to approach this philosophy is through interinstitutional partnerships. One of the solutions we have found for this is the establishment of a PhD partnership scheme, with its first iteration launched between Luka Mustafa and the University College London (UCL) in 2015.

The idea behind the programme is providing PhDs with a comperhensive experience of academic-industral collaboration as well as the skills and networks that accompany it. We are extremely proud of our first partnership with UCL, which has proved highly benefitial to both partners.

"Wireless optical commnucation project KORUZA has sparked the PhD collaboration strategy between Institute IRNAS and UCL. Luka Mustafa has started the work there as an undergraduate and requiring rapid prototyping facilities and an interdisciplinary team established an environment with engineering skills while keeping in close contact with the academic world. This has resulted in development and construction of various experimental devices, equipment and even a large-scale teting facility, producing scientifically interesting measurements as well as very practical outputs best required for product development and industrial use. The most appealing perspective of a shared environment with a full engineering team is very rapid development cycle, boosted by the expertese at the academic institution to evaluate and validate the output, jointly creating exciting new applied solutions."

- Luka Mustafa, PhD student at UCL spending most of his time at IRNAS Institute

Engineering development at universities can often be slow and cumbersome due to bureaucratically obstructed and inefficient communication between departments. In contrast, at IRNAS all the interdisciplinary knowledge sits in the same office (people from the fields of Mathematics, Electrical & Mechanical Engineering, Economics & Marketing, Biology, Acoustics, Biomedical Engineering etc.). This significantly speeds up the cooperation and makes the research experience much more vivid.

Development costs for engineering projects can also be high, due to outsourced consultancy and services. At IRNAS the PhD researcher/student has full access to knowledge, training and infrastructure that IRNAS offers, to be able to conduct cutting edge engineering and science projects. We offer infrastructure, expert knowledge and experience for high profile prototyping (3D printing, CNC machining etc.), but also biological research at our bio-laboratory with typical wet-lab capabilities, where we provide everything needed for material preparation and analytics as well as 3D Bio-Printing.

Being already active in industry, IRNAS can serve as a link for transition from the scientific stage, towards industrial applications and marketing. This, we believe, highly enriches the PhD experience and serves as an excellent starting position for future development for every researcher.