ERBE Summer School Event July 2022

The ERBE Summer School Event took place on 6^th – 7^th July in the inspiring location of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. The Summer School is an annual event that has been running now for 12 years, initiated within the LoLo CDT and now incorporated as part of the ERBE CDT programme. This year was the first Summer School event to take place in-person for the ERBE CDT students and 29 students from across the CDT attended. The Summer School is an opportunity for students to come together, away from their usual place of work, and take part in a ‘challenge’ activity. The activity is designed to push the students out of their ‘comfort-zone’ and develop their skills in different areas than those which are used on a day-to-day basis within the scope of their PhD study. Staff from across the ERBE CDT attended along with members of the ERBE Advisory Board.

This year, the students were split into 6 groups and were tasked with creating a video with the remit of explaining a home energy metric to an audience of choice. During Day 1, the task was presented to the students by Dr David Allinson, with a few ‘tips’, i.e. extra points for utilising the unique location of Cambridge in the video production. The students then went off to create their videos, and worked within the grounds of Clare Hall, and on-location within the city of Cambridge.

On the evening of Day 1, dinner was held in the beautiful location of St Catharine’s College, in central Cambridge. Professor Bob Lowe, the ERBE CDT Director at UCL, gave an after-dinner talk entitled ‘The Energy Price Crisis’. This was a candid, and up-to-date appraisal of the challenges facing the world with regards to energy supply, and the specific impact on the UK, whilst also considering the knock-on effects on other resources (i.e. food). The talk really gave the attendees a world-leading view on what the challenges are, and gave the PhD students the opportunity to see how their work could fit into the real-world, global context. Thus highlighting one of the benefits of studying for a PhD within the ERBE CDT, not only do students get a thorough grounding in the theory underpinning their research, they also benefit from the up-to-date knowledge of those working at the forefront of the sector. The video of Prof Lowe’s speech can be viewed here:

Accompanying text from the talk can be accessed here:
Notes on the Energy Price Crisis – ERBE Summer Event

The bi-annual Advisory board meeting took place on the morning of Day 2, whilst the students were finalising their videos. During the afternoon, the industry professional members had the opportunity to network with the students and judge the videos that were produced. The videos demonstrated how much the students had embraced the challenge and the outputs were both creative and informative (not to mention entertaining!). The video that won First-Prize was entitled ‘Heat Pumps 101 – Coefficient of performance (COP)’, which was produced by: Laurence Childs (UCL, Year 2), Matthew Kerr (LU Year 2), Hooman Azad (LU, Year 1), Maha Sohail (CIT, MaREI, Year 3), Suzanne O’ Keefe (UCC, MaREI, Year 2). The video can be viewed here:

Lots of positive feedback was received about the event, with students really appreciating the opportunity to connect and work with other students from across the CDT.

PhD Student Comments

Suzanne O’ Keeffe (2^nd year PhD student, UCC, MaREI)

‘This summer school was a great break from heavy academics, and I think we all enjoyed exploring our creative sides in such a beautiful location. I really enjoyed all the aspects of this challenge because it allowed us to develop different skills such as storyboarding, filming, editing, and how to present to our target audience, which will serve us during and after our PhDs. This challenge really struck the perfect balance between skills development and fun, although we may have focussed more on the fun part with our team managing to work a beer analogy into a discussion on heat pumps so that we could film in the pub! It was also really interesting to see the other teams’ video approaches and topics, and being part of the winning team was a bonus!’

Laurence Childs (2^nd year PhD student, UCL)

‘It was great to meet more colleagues at ERBE and to engage with our creative sides in the Summer School video challenge! In particular, the challenge made us think about how to communicate science outside of academia, which I think is really important. Both to improve engagement with science and to think more about the needs and concerns of different groups and stakeholders in the energy transition.’