Southampton's new £12m doctoral research centre offers cutting-edge technology

On the screen at the front of a darkened lecture theatre on Southampton University's main campus, a multi- coloured, computer generated image of the earth is slowly spinning on its axis. To the side, addressing his audience of a hundred or so academics, final year students and visitors, is Professor John Shepherd, an earth systems specialist at the university's world-renowned National Oceanography Centre. He points to the areas of ocean next to the edges of the continents, and draws our attention to the kaleidoscopic mix of colours that represent the complex tangle of eddies and currents that characterise every interface between land and sea.

It is an impressive demonstration of the illustrative power of computer modelling, but, surprisingly maybe, Shepherd is using it to highlight the limitations of existing simulation techniques, given the extreme complexity and variation of sea water turbulence at the ocean rim.

"Even with the best technology, we know we can't fully represent the complexity of the system of eddies," he explains. The occasion is an inaugural lecture to launch a newly created research centre at Southampton University, which will try to advance the capacity of computer simulation techniques across a wide range of pressing present day areas of scientific inquiry. Shepherd's theme – the complexity of marine currents – is just one area that may be understood in more detail as a result of advances piloted by the new centre. Others include climate change, financial systems and new drug design.

The central aim of the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation will be to produce a new generation of PhD students, from numerous academic disciplines, but all with highly developed powers to apply computer simulation techniques to real life challenges.

And, according to the first director of the institute, Dr Seth Bullock, the fact that research students from a number of different faculties will be working together for much of their time, guided both by supervisors from their own areas of specialism and by computer modelling experts from the institute, means they'll be getting a uniquely valuable PhD experience.

"Industry and commerce are looking for students who have a broader base and are more rounded as people, with a complete set of skills," he says. The inter-disciplinary mixing among the institute's PhD students will create research leaders of the future, capable of working across, and communicating in, several real world environments, rather than limited to one narrow and esoteric area of expertise.

"All you learn in a regular PhD," he argues, "is how to explain what you do to people who already do it whereas it's much more important to be able to explain things to people who don't know what you do."

Bullock aims to recruit 20 PhD students for the institute's first cohort starting this autumn. It'll be a four-year course. In the first year, students will spend their time together at the institute, receiving teaching in several core areas, which they will then apply to their areas of research. These include advanced computer programming and modelling, mathematical tools, and what are called complexity science.

Thereafter, students will return to their departments to start research, but continue to attend meetings and sessions as a group at the institute. Among those already signed up to start this September is Melissa Saeland, 31, about to complete a degree in oceanography and computing at Southampton. She is attracted to the prospect of grappling with the computer simulation challenges in her planned field of research – ocean acidification – alongside fellow students applying computer modelling tools to complex questions in areas as diverse as transport, species evolution and nano-technology.

"One of the problems of any discipline, and I've seen this in my oceanography degree, is that you have very limited contact with people from other disciplines," she says.

The institute has been set up jointly, at a cost of £12m, by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and the University of Southampton, together with its partners in industry. It is one of 44 new doctoral training centres launched last year, with funding from the EPSRC. Eighty per cent of the money will be spent on fees and stipends for the students. The remainder will pay for an annual summer conference run by the institute.

As the institute will work across a number of existing departments – among them the Schools of Electronics and Computer Science, Engineering Sciences, Chemistry and Geography – it will not have extensive premises of its own. However its plaque will be mounted at the entrance of an existing building on campus, and Bullock is currently negotiating with the university authorities about a suitable location.