SEERC PhD Candidate participates in Global Workshop in New Delhi, India

Our alumnus and currently PhD student and research associate at our research centre, SEERC, Mr Adrian Solomon travelled to New Delhi, India on 8-9th August 2013 together with another colleague from the university, Dr Andrea Genovese, in order to attend a workshop on Next Generation Sustainable Freight Transportation in the framework of the NEX-GIFT project, in which the University of Sheffield is the lead partner.

The NEX-GIFT project is closely related with the aims of Mr Solomon’s PhD thesis. For this reason, Dr Alok Choudhary and Prof. Panayiotis Ketikidis, the main PhD supervisor of Mr Solomon from SEERC, suggested that he took part in this global project where he would have the opportunity to become exposed to international, high quality best practices from the freight transportation field and he would get the opportunity to visit other academic institutions and network with experts and peers from this sector.

The team prepared and delivered a presentation about the status of green freight transportation in the UK as compared to USA and India. Additionally, the team had to engage the workshop participants in interactive discussions and collect the emerged best practices. Furthermore, during the networking sessions, Mr Adrian Solomon discussed the topic of his PhD “Knowledge Based Simulation Framework for Resilient Green Supply Chain - Freight Transportation in South Eastern Europe” and highly stressed the importance of his research for the progress of the South East European region as well as the importance of the efforts of TUOS International Faculty and SEERC for the same purpose. The participants were highly impressed by the collaboration between the University of Sheffield and its International Faculty, CITY College and SEERC and admired the internationalisation efforts, as well as the remarkable opportunities provided to early stage PhD students.

Mr. Solomon’s participation in this workshop was fully supported by the University of Sheffield through the NEX-GIFT project and so will be his participation in two forthcoming workshops in Sheffield-UK and Philadelphia-USA.

Adrian commented on his experience in New Delhi: “Being offered the opportunity to participate to such an international event, even from the first year of my PhD, was more than just an exceptional educational opportunity which SEERC and the University of Sheffield offered me. It was a ground-breaking experience which significantly helped my PhD research by providing me further knowledge in my field and by exposing me to global practitioners from the logistics field, as well as from academia and policy making. I am highly thankful to my PhD supervisors for offering me this opportunity and for enabling all the mechanisms for me to take the best out of it, since acting local by thinking global may be one of the key success factors of nowadays research, industry and government issues. To this end, SEERC, the International Faculty, CITY College, and the University of Sheffield have always excelled in offering me a great deal of support even during my undergraduate studies (through early engagement in funded research opportunities, funded conferences, etc) and this is why my belief that pursuing a PhD at SEERC would help me take the best out of this excellent environment has already been confirmed through this project. I am really looking forward to participating on the next two workshops where I will be able to present the progress of my PhD”.