Two PhD students, Yi Zhang and Yifei Yu, working under the tutorship of CSIC’s Professor of Civil Engineering, Kenichi Soga, have been awarded Schlumberger Foundation Faculty for the Future fellowships.
“Our PhD students including Yi and Yifei are continuously exploring new interdisciplinary research ideas in the Engineering Department. Their work is the backbone of the technologies exploited by CSIC and the industry collaborators. Without them, CSIC would not exist,” said Professor Soga.
The fellowships are awarded to talented women in science and engineering from developing and emerging countries providing funding for their advanced graduate studies at top universities. The awards are very competitive, and are awarded to women who have excelled academically and who are potential role models for other women in science and engineering.
Yi Zhang is working on city-scale modelling of geothermal energy. Yi graduated from Tsinghua University, in China, with a Bachelor Degree in Thermal Engineering. She then studied at Imperial College for an MSc degree in Environmental Engineering and Business Management. In 2012, Yi joined the Geotechnical and Environmental Research Group for further study at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD study under a BP studentship is to develop a city-scale geothermal simulation tool to examine the geothermal energy potential in a city and to identify how many Ground Source Heat Pumps (GSHPs) can be installed in contributing to the heating and cooling demands of buildings and infrastructures at the city scale. This project is also taken as part of the research of Low Carbon Energy University Alliance of Tsinghua, Cambridge and MIT.
Yifei Yu is working on fibre optics analyser development. Yifei obtained her Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the University of Bristol in 2011 with First Class Honours. After her undergraduate study, she obtained her MPhil from the University of Cambridge in the subject of MEMS, based at the Nanoscience Centre. Yifei joined the Geotechnical & Environmental Engineering Research Group in January 2013 as a PhD student. Her PhD studies Brillouin fibre optics sensor analyser design for civil infrastructure monitoring.