Professor Tony Hey and Professor John Shepherd are to speak at the launch of the Southampton Institute for Complex Systems Simulation (ICSS) today at an event that will attract academics, industrialists and students.

Professor Hey, who is Corporate Vice President of External Research at Microsoft is a world leader in simulation modelling involving high-performance computing and Professor John Shepherd, who is a Professorial Research Fellow in Earth System Science at the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton and Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, specialises in climate modelling simulation.

The new Institute, which spans a range of science and engineering Schools within the University and involves over 20 industrial and governmental partners, will enrol its first 20 PhD researchers in October this year. 

According to Dr Seth Bullock, Professor Jonathan Essex, and Dr Hans Fangohr, the Institute’s Directors, it will equip them to carry out high-quality, sophisticated simulations in the context of live research challenges.

The £12m Institute is jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the University of Southampton and its partners. It will train doctoral students to combine complex systems ideas with powerful computational tools in order to address challenges within key application domains spanning climate, pharma, biosciences, nanoscience, medical and chemical systems, transport, the environment, engineering and computing.

'We will shortly be seeing, or in some cases are already beginning to see, simulation modelling used to drive the design of new drugs tested on simulated organisms, to shape our response to climate change, to redesign our transport systems, and even to inform exit strategies from wars.  The quality of these simulations is becoming crucial,' said Dr Bullock.

'At the moment, when the systems being modelled are increasingly complex, it is hard to know whether to trust some of the simulations that are being built.  The ready availability of cheap computational power and the ease with which simulations can be constructed means that we will be seeing more and more of them.  Over the next decade, our Institute will help create a generation of doctoral graduates equipped to act as research leaders in building and deploying credible complex systems simulation across a range of disciplines, from nanomachines to global ocean systems.’

http://www.icss.soton.ac.uk