Cranfield University doctoral degree graduates Victor Igwemezie and Bernadin Namoano have been awarded prestigious fellowships to provide a springboard for their academic careers.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Doctoral Prize fellowships are funded through flexible use of the Doctoral Training Partnerships aimed at enabling universities to recruit and retain the very best newly qualified doctoral students and help to launch their research careers.

Victor and Bernadin – who completed an EngD and PhD at Cranfield respectively – will begin their two-year postdoctoral positions at the University in April, working on research to assess the structural integrity of wire-arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) parts for industry, and improve journeys for train passengers.

Professor Helen Atkinson CBE FREng, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Aerospace, Transport Systems and Manufacturing at Cranfield University said: “The award of these fellowships is wonderful news for Victor and Bernadin, and is another example of how Cranfield is supporting early career academics and investing in research for the future. We look forward to watching their careers develop and seeing the outputs from their research projects which will provide practical benefits for industry and railway users.”

Dr Victor Igwemezie said: “Winning the EPSRC Doctoral Prize has been the greatest moment in my career. This prize will afford me the rare opportunity of researching on failure and mechanism of failure in wrought and WAAM parts in the hope of developing processes and new materials for technological advancement.”

Dr Bernadin Namoano said: “I am deeply pleased and honoured to receive this prestigious fellowship award as it shows that my work is recognised and useful to others. This award will allow me to explore the next steps of my research, including developing an integrated diagnosis, prognosis, and cost benefits tool for time series fleet analysis. Such a tool will benefit big time series users such as the manufacturing, aerospace and medicine industries.”

Victor’s EngD research was titled Corrosion-Fatigue Behaviour of Structural Steel for Offshore Wind Turbine Foundation and his successful proposal for the EPSRC Doctoral Prize focuses on two projects: Structural Metallurgy and Integrity of Wrought and WAAM Steels, and Fatigue Crack Propagation Mechanism in Structural Steels.

Bernadin wrote his PhD about diagnostics and prognostics of time series data from faults in trains and his proposal for the EPSRC Doctoral Prize – titled Streaming Analytics to Improve the Passenger Journey – focuses on real-time analytics to deliver cost effective prognostics to customers.

The EPSRC Doctoral Prize is a national scheme run by holders of EPSRC Doctoral Training Partnerships (DTPs).

Victor and Bernadin will also be part of the researcher development programme which Cranfield is running for its 75th Anniversary Fellowship Scheme.