UK economic growth, security, and sustainability are in danger of being compromised due to insufficient infrastructure supply. This partly reflects a recognised skills shortage in Engineering and the Physical Sciences. The proposed EPSRC funded Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) aims to produce the next generation of engineers and scientists needed to meet the challenge of providing Sustainable Infrastructure Systems critical for maintaining UK competitiveness. The CDT will focus on Energy, Water, and Transport in the priority areas of National Infrastructure Systems, Sustainable Built Environment, and Water. Future Engineers and Scientists must have a wide range of transferable and technical skills and be able to collaborate at the interdisciplinary interface. Key attributes include leadership, the ability to communicate and work as a part of a large multidisciplinary network, and to think outside the box to develop creative and innovative solutions to novel problems. The CDT will be based on a cohort ethos to enhance educational efficiency by integrating best practices of traditional longitudinal top-down / bottom-up learning with innovative lateral knowledge exchange through peer-to-peer "coaching" and outreach. To inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists an outreach supply chain will link the focal student within his/her immediate cohort with: 1) previous and future cohorts; 2) other CDTs within and outside the University of Southampton; 3) industry; 4) academics; 5) the general public; and 6) Government. The programme will be composed of a first year of transferable and technical taught elements followed by 3 years of dedicated research with the opportunity to select further technical modules, and/or spend time in industry, and experience international training placements. Development of expertise will culminate in an individual project aligned to the relevant research area where the skills acquired are practiced. Cohort building and peer-to-peer learning will be on-going throughout the programme, with training in leadership, communication, and problem solving delivered through initiatives such as a team building residential course; a student-led seminar series and annual conference; a Group Design Project (national or international); and industry placement. The cohort will also mentor undergraduates and give outreach presentations to college students, school children, and other community groups. All activities are designed to facilitate the creation of a larger network. Students will be supported throughout the programme by their supervisory team, intensively at the start, through weekly tutorials during which a technical skills gap analysis will be conducted to inform future training needs. Benefitting from the £120M investment in the new Engineering Campus at the Boldrewood site the CDT will provide a high class education environment with access to state-of-the-art computer and experimental facilities, including large-scale research infrastructure, e.g. hydraulics laboratories with large flumes and wave tanks which are unparalleled in the UK. Students will benefit from the co-location of engineering, education, and research alongside industry users through this initiative. To provide cohort, training, inspiration and research legacies the CDT will deliver: 1) Sixty doctoral graduates in engineering and science with a broad understanding of the challenges faced by the Energy, Water, and Transport industries and the specialist technical skills needed to solve them. They will be ambitious research, engineering, industrial, and political leaders of the future with an ability to demonstrate creativity and innovation when working as part of teams. 2) A network of home-grown talent, comprising of several CDT cohorts, with a greater capability to solve the "Big Problems" than individuals, or small isolated clusters of expertise, typically generated through traditional training programmes.

Within the next few years the number of devices connected to each other and the Internet will outnumber humans by almost 5:1. These connected devices will underpin everything from healthcare to transport to energy and manufacturing. At the same time, this growth is not just in the number or variety of devices, but also in the ways they communicate and share information with each other, building hyper-connected cyber-physical infrastructures that span most aspects of people's lives. For the UK to maximise the socio-economic benefits from this revolutionary change we need to address the myriad trust, identity, privacy and security issues raised by such large, interconnected infrastructures. Solutions to many of these issues have previously only been developed and tested on systems orders of magnitude less complex in the hope they would 'scale up'. However, the rapid development and implementation of hyper-connected infrastructures means that we need to address these challenges at scale since the issues and the complexity only become apparent when all the different elements are in place. There is already a shortage of highly skilled people to tackle these challenges in today's systems with latest estimates noting a shortfall of 1.8M by 2022. With an estimated 80Bn malicious scans and 780K records lost daily due to security and privacy breaches, there is an urgent need for future leaders capable of developing innovative solutions that will keep society one step ahead of malicious actors intent on compromising security, privacy and identity and hence eroding trust in infrastructures. The Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) 'Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security - at scale' (TIPS-at-Scale) will tackle this by training a new generation of interdisciplinary research leaders. We will do this by educating PhD students in both the technical skills needed to study and analyse TIPS-at-scale, while simultaneously studying how to understand the challenges as fundamentally human too. The training involves close involvement with industry and practitioners who have played a key role in co-creating the programme and, uniquely, responsible innovation. The implementation of the training is novel due to its 'at scale' focus on TIPS that contextualises students' learning using relevant real-world, global problems revealed through project work, external speakers, industry/international internships/placements and masterclasses. The CDT will enrol ten students per year for a 4-year programme. The first year will involve a series of taught modules on the technical and human aspects of TIPS-at-scale. There will also be an introductory Induction Residential Week, and regular masterclasses by leading academics and industry figures, including delivery at industrial facilities. The students will also undertake placements in industry and research groups to gain hands-on understanding of TIPS-at-scale research problems. They will then continue working with stakeholders in industry, academia and government to develop a research proposal for their final three years, as well as undertake internships each year in industry and international research centres. Their interdisciplinary knowledge will continue to expand through masterclasses and they will develop a deep appreciation of real-world TIPS-at-scale issues through experimentation on state-of-the-art testbed facilities and labs at the universities of Bristol and Bath, industry and a city-wide testbed: Bristol-is-Open. Students will also work with innovation centres in Bath and Bristol to develop novel, interdisciplinary solutions to challenging TIPS-at-scale problems as part of Responsible Innovation Challenges. These and other mechanisms will ensure that TIPS-at-Scale graduates will lead the way in tackling the trust, identity, privacy and security challenges in future large, massively connected infrastructures and will do so in a way that considers wider sosocial responsibility.

All living organisms that make up life on Earth are made from a profusion of elements in the periodic table, including trace metals. However, in addition to oxygen (O) and hydrogen (H), the constituents of water, the three most important are Carbon (C), Nitrogen (N) and Phosphorus (P). These have become known as the Macro-Nutrients. These macronutrients are in constant circulation between living organisms (microbes, plants, animals, us) and the environment (atmosphere, land, rivers, oceans). Until human intervention (circa post industrial revolution and even more so since WWII) these 'cycles' were largely in balance: plants took up CO2 and produced O2 and, in order to do so, took up limited amounts of N and P from the environment (soils, rivers) and, on death, this "sequestered" C,N,P was returned back to the Earth. The problem is that human or anthropogenic activity has put these key macro-nutrient cycles out of balance. For example, vast quantities of once fossilised carbon, taken out of the atmosphere before the age of the dinosaurs, are being burnt in our power stations and this has increased atmospheric CO2 by about 30 % in recent times. More alarmingly, perhaps, is that man's industrial efforts have more than doubled the amount of N available to fertilize plants, and vast amounts of P are also released through fertilizer applications and via sewage. As the population continues to grow, and the developing world catches up, and most likely overtakes, the western world, these imbalances in the macro-nutrient cycles are set to be exacerbated. Indeed, such is the impact of man's activity on Earth that some are calling this the 'Anthropocene': Geology's new age. The environmental and social problems associated with these imbalances are diverse and complex; most people would be familiar with the ideas behind global warming and CO2 but fewer may appreciate the links to methane and nitrous oxide or the potential health impacts of excess nitrate in our drinking water. These imbalances are not being ignored and indeed a great deal of science, policy and management has been expended to mitigate the impacts of these imbalances. However, despite our progress in the science underpinning this understanding over the last 30-40 years or so, too much of this science has been focused on the individual macro-nutrients e.g. N, and in isolated parts of the landscape e.g. rivers. To compound this even further, such knowledge and understanding has often been garnered using disparate, or sometimes even antiquated, techniques. Anthropogenic activity has spread this macro-nutrient pollution all over the landscape. Some of it is taken up by life, some is stored, but a good deal of it works its way through the landscape towards our already threatened seas. We need to understand what happens to the macronutrients as they move, or flux, through different parts of the landscape and such understanding can only come about by a truly integrated science programme which examines the fate of the macronutrients simultaneously in different parts of the landscape. Here we will for the first time make parallel measurements, using truly state-of-the-art technologies, of the cycling and flux of all three macronutrients on the land and in the rivers that that land drains and, most importantly, the movement of water that transports the macro-nutrients from the land to the rivers e.g. the hydrology. Moreover, we will compare these parallel measurements across land to river in different types of landscapes: clay, sandstone and chalk, subjected to different agricultural usage in order to understand how the cycling on the land is connected, via the movement of water, to that in the rivers.

The widespread use of agrochemicals in catchments serving drinking water reservoirs has important implications for the water industry. It is well documented that increasing inputs of nitrogen and phosphorus from local catchments are correlated with increasing phytoplankton blooms (pea-soup water) in lakes and reservoirs. Frequently, these blooms are toxic to humans and their removal has increasing cost implications for the water industry. An additional problem comes from the widespread use of pesticides in agricultural catchments. In the UK, limits are drawn up for individual pesticides as specified in the EU Drinking Water Directive. However, less well known are the impacts to the biota within the reservoirs. It is possible that bacteria can rapidly utilise certain pesticides as organic substrates thereby reducing their impact in the water body. Alternatively, they may also break them down into substances that are potentially more toxic. An additional unknown is the impact of herbicides on the autotrophic communities within reservoirs. Herbicide impacts may be selective, promoting growth of the more tolerant members of the phytoplankton. Pesticides are known to cause lethal and sub-lethal effects on zooplankton communities. These organisms can control phytoplankton bloom development by grazing. Reduction in their grazing ability may affect bloom size. Identifying the key pesticides and their interactions with the organisms within reservoirs may lead to alterations in management practices and the potential to reduce the costs of water treatment. A combination of field and laboratory investigations will be undertaken to assess the scale of pesticide inputs and quantify their impacts to the biota both at the single species level and community level within food webs. The study site is Durleigh Reservoir which frequently suffers pollution events from pesticides and herbicides, in addition to nutrients, and is one of a network of drinking water reservoirs within the Wessex catchment experiencing similar impacts from agricultural intensification. The student will benefit from working with a team of scientists, each with expertise in one major group of aquatic organisms, and will receive training in a range of techniques designed to measure the effects of pesticides and/or herbicides on these organisms. Additionally, they will work alongside staff within Wessex Water, both on field site visits and within the laboratory and will gain insight into all aspects of the processing steps involved in the treatment of pesticides from raw water to tap water. Wessex has a regular sampling and analytical programme for water sampled in each of their reservoirs and these data will be provided, at no cost, including all of the pesticide analyses on water samples. The student will receive analytical methodological training whilst working in their laboratories. Results obtained from the intensive survey of one reservoir will have broader application within Wessex Water and will be high utility for other water companies and agencies e.g. the Environment Agency.

RESCCUE aims to deliver a framework enabling city resilience assessment, planning and management by integrating into software tools new knowledge related to the detailed water-centred modelling of strategic urban services performance into a comprehensive resilience platform. These tools will assess urban resilience from a multisectorial approach, for current and future climate change scenarios and including multiple hazards. The project will review and integrate in the general framework existing options to assess climate change impacts and urban systems vulnerabilities allowing to assess multisectorial dependencies under multiple climate change scenarios. An adaptation strategies portfolio, including climate services, ecosystem-based approaches and resource efficiency measures will be incorporated as key components of the deployment strategy. The possible approaches will be ranked by their cost-efficiency in terms of CAPEX and OPEX to evaluate their benefits potential. This will enable city managers and urban system operators deciding the optimal investments to cope with future situations. The validation platform is formed by 3 EU cities (Barcelona, Lisboa and Bristol) that will allow testing the innovative tools developed in the project and disseminating their results among other cities belonging to major international networks. In terms of market potential, RESCCUE will generate large potential benefits, in terms of avoided costs during and after emergencies, that will contribute to their large-scale deployment. The structure of the consortium will guarantee the market uptake of the results, as the complete value chain needed is already represented. The project is coordinated by Aquatec, a large consultancy firm part of a multinational company focused on securing and recovering resources, and includes partners from the research domain, operation of critical urban systems, city managers and international organisations devoted to urban resilience.