Alongside the specific potential benefits to applied flood and coastal risk management, I have seen first-hand that the SAMBa CDT produces high calibre doctoral graduates with excellent skills in problem formulation and collaborative problem solving to address real-world challenges.”
Dr Sean Longfield Lead Scientist, Flood & Coastal Risk Management Research
The Environment Agency is an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra). In addition to being the lead government agency for flood risk management in England, the Environment Agency is also responsible for protecting and improving water, land and biodiversity.
The Environment Agency has been working closely with the SAMBa CDT and Department of Mathematical Sciences for the past six-years, participating in SAMBa Integrative Think Tanks (ITT) in 2018 and 2023.
Reporting on his experience of the Environment Agency’s first ITT in 2018, Dr Sean Longfield said, “The SAMBa ITT was a unique experience for me. To have a room full of enthusiastic, highly-skilled applied mathematicians working on real-world challenges for a full week was great.”
Participation in ITT7 in 2018 initially led to a short-term interdisciplinary research project which inspired Piotr Morawiecki’s PhD project exploring unifying different approaches for flood estimation.
The Environment Agency returned to join SAMBa at ITT17 in 2023, alongside the JBA Trust. One of the challenges brought to the ITT is being extended via an interdisciplinary research project and a joint PhD project on a topic related to flooding is being developed.
"We are working with SAMBa to develop new tools for managing risk by combining deterministic and probabilistic methods."
There were a couple of ongoing personal research collaborations with Novartis in the Department of Mathematical Sciences that were brought together to develop a set of challenges for Novartis’s participation in ITT12. These consisted of questions exploring modelling and data integration in pharmacokinetics models, and finding effective routes to drug development for liver disease.
"We found participating in the ITT to be an unique and engaging environment for exchanging ideas and it was also good fun. Above all it produced some truly innovative thinking."
"For a small company like ours, this research is vital in delivering our vision to create digital technologies that change what’s possible for clinicians and patients."
"The collaboration between SAMBa, UNAM and CIMAT has strengthened us in tools and techniques to visualize new perspectives of development and collaboration with a focus on generating value for other institutions."
"The students at SAMBa were engaging and motivated, above all interested in solving real world problems with their skills. As a result of SAMBa we have taken huge strides forward in a new technique in the assessment of arthritis related to psoriasis and the effect of treatment.
“We have a great track record of successful collaboration with SAMBa, as we share a common aim – applying the latest thinking in mathematics and statistics to solve real-world problems."
"Working with SAMBa students to relay how our industry understands the daily challenges in aerospace design and manufacture and for them to translate them into statistical/mathematical models and methods was a refreshing and rewarding concept."