Our Curriculum

We are striving to embed sustainability within our curriculum, via dedicated taught courses, student research projects, and employability challenges.

Taught Curriculum

Our ultimate goal is to embed sustainble practices and address sustainability challenges throughout our curriculum. Whilst we have started this process by beginning to incorporate examples of sustainablity issues into our teaching, we also have the following courses which are centred completely around sustainability. 

OR in the Energy industry

Operational research (OR) methods are widely used in the energy industry in areas such as system operation, system planning, market design and reliability analysis. There is currently particular interest in the development of new methods both in industry and in academia. This is due to issues such as increasing volumes of renewable generation, and increased interaction between end users and the energy system. Our ‘OR in the Energy Industry’ course combines technical OR and optimization skills, along with computing and modelling techniques, to allow our students to study a range of current energy industry challenges such as: optimal power flow, unit commitment, power system planning, modelling of competition in markets, electricity market design, and heat and gas networks.

Maths in Action: Mathematics of Climate

Understanding the Earth’s climate and predicting how it will change is a key challenge for 21st century science. Whilst many of these problems span across multiple disciplines, we can begin to tackle many of these problems using a broad range of mathematical tools: statistics, probability, differential equations, and numerical methods in particular. Our ‘Maths in Action: Mathematics of Climate’ course introduces some of these current issues and enables our students to formulate them as mathematical models, before considering analytical and numerical solution methods. The course answers questions such as: why is an exponential increase in CO2 leading to a linear increase in temperature? What is El Niño and how can it be predicted? How do climate models work? Or what are tipping points?

Student Projects

The following sample of project titles from 2021 demonstrate a great variety of topics that fall within the interests of sustainability.

Undergraduate dissertation projects (individual and small groups)

• Measures of ecological and social diversity  
• Modelling the energy demand of halls of residence 
• Optimal unit commitment for electricity generation 
• Polynomial Optimization: From Real Algebraic Geometry to Water Networks 
• Project in power system reliability 
• Quantifying parameter uncertainty in a dynamic, small-glacier evolution model using Bayesian inference (in the Alps)
• Using statistical learning to identify important predictors of tree vitality 

MSc disseration projects (individual)

• Automated generation of instructions for the National Grid Balancing Mechanism 
• Hierarchical model for reliability properties of electric power generating units 
• Modelling tree survival for investigating climate change effects 
• Optimal integration of microgrids into smart electricity grids 
• Optimal battery scheduling 
• The effect of climate change on local ecology (with Arup)
• Islay Green Hydrogen Project (with EMRC)
• Predictive Modelling using SCADA Wind Farm Data (with Ventient Energy)
• Quantifying Uncertainty in Chaotic Systems in Climate Modelling 

Statistics with Data Science MSc projects (consultancy style for up to 30 students per project)

• Reselling second-hand items: Identifying the likelihood of stuff being sold online (with THRIFT)
• Understanding forest damage in Germany: Finding key drivers to help with future forest conversion of climate sensitive stands (with Forest Research Institue, Baden-Württemberg)
• Hidden Markov models as tools to identify seabird foraging areas (with Joint Nature Conservation Committee)

Employability Challenges

As part of our work in supporting students with careers and employability advice, students have been offered the opportunity to participate in the following employability challenge:

How to transition Jura distillery to net zero

This event was a 2 day Creative Data Lab event hosted by DMA in partnership with Whyte & MacKay.