News
New Partnership Agreements to Foster Indian-Ireland
Academic Links in Civil Engineering
As part of the Ireland-Indian Initiative in Civil Engineering (I3CE@TCD) Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, recently established new partnerships with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi and Thapar University, Patiala. The Memorandums of Understanding will enable the Indian institutions cooperate with Trinity College Dublin in teaching and research, provide postgraduate training and education in Civil Engineering, and promote student and staff exchange.
Trinity’s Adjunct Professor Ravindra Dhir and Associate Professor Roger West, of TrinityHaus, the Centre for Construction Innovation and Sustainability at Trinity, were instrumental in developing the initiatives.
The aim of Ireland-Indian Initiative in Civil Engineering is to foster links between Trinity College Dublin and a select number of high level Indian academic institutions to facilitate the exchange of staff and postgraduate students in the delivery of the MSc/MTech taught course programmes. It will allow Indian or Irish students to spend one year in the partner institution with full credit towards their degree. Indian students from partner institutions who are accepted to attend for an academic year in Trinity will be awarded a scholarship. Dissertations will be co-supervised with a corresponding academic in the partner institution.
Trinity College Dublin already hosts a number of MTech Internship students who are researching composite bamboo columns for structural use, in collaboration with Professor Suresh Bhalla of IIT Delhi, supported by the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Science at Trinity College Dublin.
The Ireland-India Concrete Research Initiative (IICRI) is developing collaborations in research with such partner institutions, including joint funding and supervision of PhD students. There is a significant challenge for both countries in developing more sustainable concrete, essential to infrastructural, commercial and domestic building projects. The use of greener alternative cements in concrete leads to changes in the durability characteristics which have relevance for both life-cycle costings and the carbon footprint associated with infrastructural development. The consortium of Civil Engineering at Trinity College Dublin and its Indian partners aim to share expertise, knowledge, resources and facilities in order to disseminate the necessary innovations to allow Irish and Indian engineers to take advantage of more sustainable concrete materials with confidence in the future.
For more information on Engineering programmes at Trinity College Dublin see www.tcd.ie/Engineering.