Industrial Fellowship 2015-18

Industrial Fellow: Fiona Muirhead
Company: Leonardo
Company industry: Aerospace, Defence and Security
Company size: 7,400 employees (UK)
Company founded: 1948
Industrial Supervisor: David Greig, Lead Systems Engineer
University: University of Edinburgh

Fiona Muirhead

“The Industrial Fellowship’s R&D expanded our systems’ range of applications and attracted new customers”

The Royal Commission’s Industrial Fellowship unlocked additional funding for our Industrial Fellow’s research, which she performed while working at Leonardo. The funding gave her more freedom to widen her engagement and bring in new ideas to the project. The Commission’s support also facilitated flight trials in which the Fellow had significant input into what specific data was collected and how, freeing her from needing to rely on data sets from existing trials, ensuring she could design and obtain tailored inputs for her PhD research plan. These experiences provided her with valuable insight and ideas that allowed her to hit the ground running at our company.

Her ongoing work has and will continue to improve the specifications of our systems and allow them to be employed across a wider range of applications, thereby attracting new customers.

The Royal Commission also provided support in the Fellow’s attendance and participation at a number of international conferences and NATO meetings. These furthered Leonardo’s reputation as being interested in science and supportive of academia on their own merits. She was even able to visit a collaborator at the University of Pisa, benefitting her research and expanding our academic network.

All of the above experiences have allowed the Fellow to rapidly become and continue to be an integral part of our team beyond her Fellowship.

We found the Industrial Fellowship to be a mutually beneficial programme, acting as a springboard for young scientists to create immediate impact at their companies.