A new cohort of PhD students have been welcomed to The Liverpool Doctoral Training Network (DTN) in Technologies for Healthy Ageing at a dedicated event.
The 11 students in the network are funded through the EPSRC, the Samuel Crossley-Barnes Endowment and the Faculties of Science and Engineering and Health and Life Sciences.
The DTN aims to train the next generation of students and engineers to develop novel technologies and devices to address the real challenges faced by older people and clinical colleagues who work with them. It also aims to bridge the gap between the industries developing the novel technologies and the older people in our communities and their healthcare providers, to promote healthy ageing.
Each student project has supervisors from across the Faculties to provide guidance on all aspects of their projects across this multidisciplinary area.
Gaia Lugano and Naomi Northage
The launch event saw the primary supervisor for each project introduce their student and a brief summary of the project, and Consultant Geriatrician Dr Asan Akpan gave a presentation on the importance of developing new strategies and technologies for this patient group that he and his colleagues care for every day.
Professor Rachel Williams, who is one of the network leads, said: “This event highlighted the breadth of subjects to be studied across the projects from the development of tissue engineering constructs for the eye or bone and drug delivery devices through robotic assistive devices to pharmacokinetic modelling and the exploration of socio-economic and geographic variation in care pathways.
“It was wonderful to see the conversations flow between the students themselves as well as with the many different supervisors who attended.”
PhD student Sandra Granana Castillo said: “It was a pleasure to meet the other new PhD students and respective supervisors. It was great to see a group of young people with different backgrounds and upcoming projects but with the same main objective.”
To find out more about the University’s Doctoral Training Programmes, click here.