As part of a faculty-wide initiative to address systemic underrepresentation of UK BAME students at Postgraduate level, SEMS funded two BAME undergraduate student summer internships.

The successful students took part in a variety of work, gaining a broad understanding of research skills and methods as well as academic and industry-based career paths available to them.

During a two-month internship in Dr Caroline Roney’s Personalised Cardiac Modeling lab, Hichem Taleb tackled the complex problem of Atrial Fibrillation. Exploring the cutting edge of AI and Physics-Informed Neural Networks, he helped to model and predict the heart's electrical activity. His impressive results will benefit the future research of the Roney group, and he leaves inspired by the potential of merging traditional mathematical modelling with AI for medical breakthroughs.

Ismail Moalin, a first-year undergraduate engineering student in SEMS worked on a summer research internship project titled 'The Dynamics of Swing Pumping' under the joint supervision of Dr Rehan Shah and Prof Henri Huijberts.

As part of this project, Ismail tackled the problem of modelling a playground swing system as an elaborated pendulum. This pendulum can help investigate the frequently adopted standing-pumping swing strategy often used by riders to increase their amplitude of swinging. He analytically derived the key differential equations for the model using Newtonian dynamics techniques. He also numerically computed amplitude and phase trajectory plots for the system using Python. Ismail benefitted greatly from the mentorship from both supervisors and the research skills and training workshops provided by the faculty.