Two students accepted onto Turing Enrichment Scheme
The Turing Enrichment scheme offers students currently undertaking a PhD in the UK an opportunity to enhance and broaden their research project with a placement at the Alan Turing Institute for up to 12 months, providing access to the facilities and opportunities available at The Alan Turing Institute and its partners.
We are proud to report that Josh Nevin, based at our Cambridge site, and Chris Parsonson from UCL, have been accepted onto the prestigious scheme. Josh begins his placement in the autumn and Chris starts his next January. They’ll both be continuing their PhDs alongside the scheme but working out of the Turing offices at the British Library in London.
About Josh
Josh works on Bayesian approaches to physical layer problems in optical networks under the supervision of Professor Seb Savory at University of Cambridge. He hopes the Enrichment scheme will provide a fantastic opportunity to collaborate with specialists working at the forefront of research fields that he wouldn't normally have access to. Josh aims to develop his understanding and application of machine learning and Bayesian statistics whilst on the placement, enabling him to improve the quality of his research and discover creative approaches to solving problems in engineering and data science.
About Chris
For his PhD Chris studies the design, control and optimisation of data centre network systems using artificial intelligence supervised by Dr Georgios Zervas at UCL,. Chris is looking forward to attending the range of workshops, seminars, and conferences offered by the scheme and experiencing the vibrant, interdisciplinary, and cognitively diverse environment at the Turing Institute. He plans to work with experts across a variety of disciplines and projects to share knowledge and exchange ideas that will challenge and extend his research beyond its current scope.
An exciting year for them both
Ahead of their Turing Enrichment placements, both Josh and Chris are completing technical internships at Ahren and InstaDeep, respectively. Josh is currently undertaking a month-long remote-based position with Ahren where he’s working directly with the investment team to source, evaluate and diligence AI/ML deal flow. Chris will be working at InstaDeep in London for 6 months as a PhD Research Scientist Intern. He’ll be developing novel reinforcement learning (RL) and graph neural network (GNN) algorithms and architectures to improve the exploratory, generality, and scalability capabilities of these RL-GNN models in solving graph-based combinatorial optimisation problems.