William Ferguson submits his thesis!

Congratulations to William Ferguson, the first of our 2016 cohort to submit their thesis. His thesis was titled ‘Auxetic power amplification mechanisms for low frequency vibration energy harvesting’. William was supervised by Prof. Meiling Zhu, Prof. Ken Evans and Prof. Christopher Smith.

William has published two papers- ‘Student Perspectives On The Concurrent Engineering Challenge 2017’ in Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Space Educational Activities; ‘Auxetic Structure for Increased Power Output of Strain Vibration Energy Harvester’ in Sensors & Actuators A. Physical.

During his time in the CDT William has been involved in outreach initiatives such as being a support volunteer for Soapbox Science and demonstrating magnetism to the public as part of Lighting Up Ramm.

In his own words, William describes his experience as a PhD student:

My thesis is done!
Years of swearing at machines, months of banging my head against a keyboard, weeks of procrastinating editing, days of fiddling with MATLAB until the graphs are presentable; all of it came down to collecting the bound theses less than an hour before the printshop closes for who knows how long. So that was fun.
I’ve learnt a lot in the last three and a half years. Such as how to effectively manage people. Perseverance. Systematic problem solving. And thyself. Peaking behind the academic curtain was all very fine and pleasant, but now I’d like to see how the rest of the world compares.
Incidentally, do look me up if you or someone you know is in need of a holistic engineer (a job title I’m trying to give traction, defined as: one who builds/designs with an appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things, often because they’ve been wrapped in gaffer tape by said engineer).

All the best,
William Ferguson

William presented at the following conferences: