I am doing MEng in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Birmingham (UoB), UK. I am doing everything possible in my capacity and whenever I have time to promote environment advocacy, to encourage others for events like ?Tree Plantation?, ?Clean Air day cycling? , ?Recycling drives?, ?Clean up drives?. I am trying to make a difference here, a positive difference whether it is as a student or a student representative or a President of various societies/clubs I have lead. The idea is to use the time at the university not only to study but also to influence and mobilise my peers towards protecting and improving environment for a healthier, safer, cleaner and greener future.

Being sustainable is the only sensible choice in today's world. University of Birmingham is working to reduce its negative environmental and social effects, whilst maximising the positive impacts our research and learning have on the world.

What is sustainability?

Sustainability is concerned with the long-term health of humans and our planet as well as the economic systems that help us to prosper. The planet has limited natural resources and tolerances to pollution and so it?s important that we live within our means. This is for the benefit of future and current generations as well as ourselves. Embedding ethical principles is another part of sustainability that helps us to protect people too.

Our university is helping to find solutions to global challenges such as climate change, through efficient travel, alternative fuels and energy storage. We are striving to have huge positive impacts through our research whilst trying to minimise the carbon and other effects produced along the way.

Sustainability at the University of Birmingham is the responsibility of all students and staff community and is embedded across our Colleges and Professional Services.

The Sustainability Task Group (STG) oversees the development of policies and practices for sustainability and is complemented by College Environmental Committees who formulate their own plans. Academics and Professional Services staff work together and alongside one another to make Birmingham greener.

We at UoB are studying the impact of climate and environmental change on woodlands.

Thanks to a transformational gift of £15 million, a new Birmingham Institute for Forest Research (BIFoR) will be established by the University to study the impact of climate and environmental change on woodlands. In addition to on-campus laboratories, the Institute will comprise ground-breaking field facilities, enabling scientists to take measurements from deep within the soil to above the tree canopy. 

Sustainable cities

Cities provide many functions. They support our economy, society in general and the individual. But with a growing population, most of whom will live in cities, space is becoming an ever-increasing concern. How we live in cities – from the way we heat our houses or use water to how we choose to travel – impacts on the environment in which we live and our quality of life: air quality, congestion, stress levels.

Limitations

Worries about budgets and space constraints, pollution and climate change are growing. We are acutely aware of the strain placed on our infrastructure; we can readily see – and therefore monitor – what?s going on at the surface. We cannot, however, easily see what lies beneath our roads and streets. We know it is a vast space and suspect that we don?t currently use it effectively. However, as we cannot see through it or know for certain what lies in it, we cannot fully utilise this space and move some of our cities? functions below ground to free up the surface to create a better environment for us all to live in.

The future

Given that the majority of people live in cities and these numbers are rising, it is important that we create spaces where people want to live in and are able to thrive – the mix of built and natural environments in which we live, work and play. There is, therefore, a need to move to sustainable, resilient and liveable future cities in which we use space and resources wisely, and to achieve this we need to start doing things differently. Applying engineering ingenuity to the more extensive use of underground space could be really important for us in the future: we would be able to free up the surface to allow space for green corridors for walking and cycling, or relaxation by communing with nature, while utilising its ?built-in? resources such as groundwater, heat and minerals. Burying some of our cities? functions could therefore increase our quality of life.

Our impact

At the University of Birmingham, we are researching:

?         The sustainability of cities in relation to the economy, society and the environment, and bringing a balance between them all.

?         The resilience of our cities. We are assessing how we continue to function in the face of change, whether incremental or radical.

?         How combining the principles of sustainability and resilience can result in our cities becoming more liveable. We are considering individual and societal well-being alongside planetary well-being, understanding how cities can move forward to the future in a way that becomes sustainable, resilient, smart, and liveable.

?         Engineering for societies: we are putting infrastructure systems in place that support civilised life. We are incorporating the long-term future into our thinking and engineering designs so that our creations will function effectively into the far future – for many decades and even up to hundreds of years.

?         How we might generate different scenarios to help in this endeavour – from the extreme to the aspirational – and build all of this into the engineering systems that we?re putting into place today. This ensures that they are not only fit for purpose today but they?re fit for purpose way into the far future no matter how the future changes.

?         How to create a world-leading National Buried Infrastructure Facility, a ?one of its kind? facility. It will support research, education and training in buried infrastructure-ground interaction, soil stabilisation and improvement, geophysical sensing, pipeline detection and condition assessment, water leak detection, and tunnelling and trenchless technologies, to name but a few of its possibilities. This facility will allow our academics to conduct research at near full scale, or at full scale, on buried infrastructure systems. It will allow us to understand better how we can produce more effective and resilient infrastructures.

?         How to better understand our existing infrastructures, so that we can maintain and adapt them for future needs, and new infrastructure systems that will enable society to use and manage our resources better.

?         How to improve our transport systems. For example, we are researching how we might move towards a greater dependence on non-motorised modes of transport as a means of creating less polluted, better functioning cities.

?         More effective gravity sensors to look deeper into the underground to reduce the risks to excavations, to understand what is buried and what condition it is in, and to know what areas we can use more safely in the future. Using the National Buried Infrastructure Facility, we are able to trial our sensors and simulate real-world applications at a real scale.

?         The development of a suite of geophysical sensors to look through the ground and understand its function, which will enable us to utilise this space in a sustainable and resilient way in the future.

?         Novel modelling techniques to enable us to consider the impact of extreme weather on our infrastructure and cities.

My individual ambition after doing my major:

It was my parents, both engineers who cultivated my curiosity by encouraging me to seek answers to discovering how things worked. So, from a very early age I was exposed to manufacturing processes and the functions of various systems, machines and technology.

I was invited to represent UAE at Global Youth Eco Leadership Summit in Seoul, South Korea last year and had the opportunity to visit the Samsung Engineering factory. I was fascinated to see how tablets and phones are made. I also did an internship at a Transformer manufacturing factory and was thrilled to observe theoretical facts in real life functioning.  "HowStuffWorks" has been my constant scientific companion helping me explore topics beyond the school curriculum.

However, it is my interest in environment that lent a sense of purpose. Besides initiating awareness campaigns and environment advocacy workshops, I have taken effort to cultivate the concept of recycling in my community. Converting discarded tyres into coffee tables helped me blend my knowledge of science with my enthusiasm for recycling. Likewise, I took the initiative to set up a waste segregation system in our community which not only promoted environmental values, but also has contributed to saving tons and tons of paper in a year. My efforts were acknowledged through awards such as the 'International Diana award'," International Young Eco Hero Award" (the only winner from UAE among 10 global winners), the national "Green Star UAE" award and the first position in the ME Green Olympiad.

It was this passion that propelled me to read and research about global warming and the significance of alternate energy. It's time we reduced our reliance on fossil fuels and build renewable energy powered infrastructure. But this is easily said than done. Renewable energy production is often expensive. After the Chernobyl disaster, nuclear energy harnessing is a heavily contested idea. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to use electrical energy sparingly. This also means that such devices and installations have to be developed and used which ensure a high net efficiency. Harvesting energy that would otherwise be wasted is the key to meeting future energy demands while reducing carbon emissions. I would like to further research the challenges and opportunities of Piezoelectric energy harvesting to design and develop products that can guarantee a greater energy yield and prove invaluable in industrial applications.

Power Electronics has played a key role in the energy sector and is a key enabler of a robust, resilient future electricity system. One of the challenges of the electric power sector is that the amount of electricity that can be generated is relatively fixed over short periods of time, although demand for electricity fluctuates throughout the day. Therefore, it is imperative to developing technology to store electrical energy for its usage on demand and help manage power distribution through peak and off- peak levels. Thus, they can optimize the functions of microgrids by balancing energy generation and deployment. Power electronics holds significant promise for transforming the electrical industry.

By pursuing Electrical & Electronic Engineering as a career, I want to study and design the systems to tap the abundant solar power in desert regions and transmit the solar power thus generated, to other areas with minimal energy losses at minimal cost. 

As a part of the Electronic and Electrical engineering team, I aspire to play an important role in the future development of a sustainable world.