Call for participants to workshop on

Under the Researcher Links scheme offered within the Newton Fund, the British Council and FAPESP will be holding a workshop on the above theme at São Paulo on March 5-8, 2015. The workshop is being coordinated by Dr Qingming Li (The University of Manchester) and Professor Marcílio Alves (University of São Paulo), and will have contributions from other leading researchers, Professor William J. Stronge (University of Cambridge), Dr Robert S. Birch (University of Liverpool), Professor Marco Lucio Bittencourt and Professor Renato Pavanello (Universidade de Campinas). We are now inviting Early Career Researchers from the UK or Brazil (State of São Paulo) to apply to attend this workshop. All travel and accommodation expenses will be covered by the Researcher Links programme. The application form, with more details on the initiative, is attached and should be sent to Qingming.li@manchester.ac.uk for UK applicants, and to maralves@usp.br for São Paulo applicants before the deadline of December 10, 2014.

The full application below must be completed and submitted by the deadline of December 10, 2014 via e-mail to:

Qingming.li@manchester.ac.uk for UK applicants

and

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  Applications must be submitted using the Researcher Links application form
  
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  Application must be submitted before the above deadline
  
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  Participants must be Early Career Researchers (ECR): ECR are defined as holding a PhD for less than 10 years on the starting date of the workshop.
  
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  All participants must come either from UK higher education institutions or from institutions in the State of São Paulo.
  

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  Experience and relevance of the applicant’s research area to the workshop
  
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  Motivation and contribution to the aims of the workshop
  
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  Description of the long term impact expected through the participation in the workshop
  
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  Ability to disseminate workshop’s outcomes
  

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  Eligibility check
  
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  Quality assessment
  
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  CV review
  

Applicants will be notified by email 2 months prior to the workshop.

The British Council is committed to equal opportunities and diversity in all its activities and this includes the avoidance of any bias in the assessment of applications due to gender, disability, racial or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, or religious belief. Participants’ selection undertaken by workshop organisers must not contravene this policy. Extra support to enable participation of early career researchers with special needs will be given.

The automobile accident injury and fatality rates in both developed and emerging/developing countries are significantly higher than those in other transportations (shipping/rail/aerospace). Considerable variation in legislative regulations governing automobile safety requirements has lead to non-uniformity in design and manufacturing standards across countries and regions, contributing to significant variations in vehicle crashworthiness.

This imbalance has been tackled by new initiatives (e.g. the World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations, the working party of the Inland Transport Division of the UNECE) in order to create a uniform system of UN Regulations for vehicle design. However, there remains considerable lack of knowledge and human capacity on this subject in both the developed and emerging/developing countries. More importantly, world-leading automobile industries are preparing to implement design-through-simulation processes to reduce the cost and lead time whilst maintaining reliability and safety. This represents big challenges to modelling and simulation techniques.

The objectives of this workshop are to:

1. 
   Bring young researchers from developed and emerging countries together to realise the social importance and engineering challenge of the vehicle safety design and harmonization.
   
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   Bridge the gap between vehicle crashworthiness research, manufacture and safety legislation in developed and emerging countries.
   
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   Address the complexity and importance of numerical modelling in vehicle design.
   
4. 
   Support young researchers to develop their expertise, career and network in the demanding area of modelling structural crashworthiness.