Industrial CASE Account - Imperial College London 2021

This grant does not fund a specific research project. Instead, it supports a training programme—the Industrial CASE Account at Imperial College London—that places PhD students into companies to work on real-world engineering and physical sciences problems. The problem it addresses is a persistent gap between academic research and industrial application. Many promising discoveries never leave the lab because researchers lack experience with commercial constraints, while companies struggle to access cutting-edge academic expertise. This programme forces that connection by making industrial collaboration a condition of the studentship. If successful, the programme produces a cohort of researchers who understand both how to push fundamental science forward and how to turn that knowledge into something usable. Past CASE students have contributed to advances in manufacturing processes, energy systems, and medical diagnostics—improvements that quietly underpin everything from more efficient jet engines to faster drug development. The immediate output is skilled people, not a single breakthrough, but those people go on to shape the technologies that keep infrastructure, supply chains, and communications running.