Watt Matters!

Details

Watt Matters! is an event for students interested in Aerospace Engineering, Robotics, Business or Psychology. Discover how your learning in the classroom is applied in real life with inspiring 45-minute talks from leading researchers that teach at Heriot-Watt University.

Each subject talk will be following by an inspiring career presentation from our alumni. Discover the career paths from those who have studied these subjects at University and learn about the possibilities within the sector.

Aerospace Engineering

Conquering Space: Transforming life on Earth, the Moon and Beyond

Join Dr George Goussetis, Professor of Microwave and Antenna Engineering at Heriot-Watt University, and discover Megaconstellations, Cubesats and how research into satellite design is solving real world problems. George will take you on a journey through the evolution of space systems, their impact on daily life and the growth of the UK aerospace industry.

Talk by Dr George Goussetis

George Goussetis is the Director of the Microwave and Antenna Engineering Laboratories and the Head of the Institute of Sensors Signals and Systems at Heriot-Watt University. Prof. Goussetis has been the Coordinator of several European Space Agency and European Commission research projects on satellite communication technologies. He is also the co-founder of two companies (Tactical Space Systems and Infinect), which are committed to improving the connectivity and services from satellite systems. His work, which has received coverage by the BBC, has been recognised with awards such as the Bell Labs Prize and the European Space Agency Young Engineer of the year. George will also be the Chair of the European Conference of Antennas and Propagation 2024, at SEC in Glasgow. Beyond satellite communication technologies, he enjoys cycling and swimming.

Business

Study! Start-up! CEO!

The year is 2027 and you are about to graduate with a degree in business management and a GREAT idea for a new business start-up! Join Dr David Steinberg, Associate Professor of Contemporary Management Practice at Heriot-Watt University, and discover how current research is helping to shape the business world of the future.

In this highly interactive session you will be asked to make decisions on the development of your company from incubator to global success! How will your Intelligent Virtual Store Design (IVSD) provide products and services to bring the in-store shopping experience into the home? Will your company flop or will you take-over the emerging metaverse?

Talk by Dr. David Steinberg

Dr. David Steinberg is the Associate Professor of Contemporary Management Practices at the Edinburgh Business School, and the EBS Director of Graduate Apprenticeship Programmes. David holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and a Masters from City, University of London.

During his 38-year career, mainly in the US private sector, he built high-performance teams and directed sales operations and strategic account management processes in extremely fast-paced work environments and competitive markets involving multi-million-dollar contracts.

In his private consulting work, he designs and delivers workshops on the art and science of asking questions for fieldwork and life skills, research question design, design thinking, and student resilience.

Psychology

Resilient Performers: Thriving in a changing and uncertain world

How do some people manage, cope with, and even thrive in difficult circumstances while others experience negative outcomes for their physical or mental health? Resilience is a concept you might have heard about, but what does it mean and how do we become resilient?

Dr Jenny Meggs, Associate Professor in Psychology at Heriot-Watt University, will explore some of the latest research in psychological resilience and sustainable performance from a variety of contexts, including sport, health, and wellbeing. Together we’ll tackle the myths and misconceptions about resilience as well as putting the research into real world contexts, such as when you’re a future graduate!

Talk by Dr Jenny Meggs

Dr Jenny Meggs is an Associate Professor in Sport Psychology at Heriot Watt University and a HCPC Sport and Exercise Psychologist who works primarily with youth and elite swimmers, track athletes and ultra-endurance triathletes. She is interested in how our understanding of psychological resilience in athletes can help us all to develop our mental toughness and mental health to support thriving in all areas of our lives. 

Robotics

Can Robots be the Superheroes of the Future?

We live in a world of dangerous jobs in extreme environments, an increasingly ageing and frail population and a climate crisis to name but a few issues. How can we solve these global problems and make life safer and better for everyone? Dr Alistair McConnell, Associate Professor in Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University explores this very question through the latest research in robotics and artificial intelligence.

Meet some of the robots and discover how they are used on hazardous offshore platforms to monitor and maintain our vital energy supplies, in the home to help frail people live independently and how we can use soft robotics to help stroke survivors recover.

Talk by Dr Alistair McConnell

Alistair's research focuses on healthcare technologies and soft robotics. His PhD was in Rehabilitation Robotics at Heriot-Watt University, and he did his post-doctoral work as part of the ORCA Hub at the University of Edinburgh in designing robotic and sensor systems for extreme environments. His work has involved the design of different types of prosthetics as well as methods of providing feedback to prosthetics users. He is a keen entrepreneur with experience in both spin-outs and start-ups. Most recently, he co-founded Mask Logic Ltd.​

Career Talks

Aerospace Engineering: careers talk by Salvador Mercader-Pellicer

Following the keynote lecture on aerospace engineering, Salvador Mercader-Pellicer will talk about his career from completing his PhD at Heriot-Watt University to working for the European Space Agency. Salva was born in Murcia, Spain and received a BEng degree in Telecommunications Engineering (with a specialization in telematics) and a MSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Universidad Politecnica de Cartagena (UPCT), Cartagena, Spain, in 2010 and 2013, respectively. He completed his PhD degree at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, in 2018 where his research focused on the design, optimisation and analysis of reflector antennas and periodic surfaces, with applications on polarisation converters and multiple beam antennas. He then moved to Airbus Defence & Space, Stevenage, U.K., as a Senior RF Antenna Engineer, working on reflector antennas and phased arrays applied mainly to Geostationary telecommunication satellites.

Salva currently works with the Antenna and Sub-Millimetre Waves Section, at the European Space Agency (ESA) in The Netherlands, where he manages activities on antennas for different space applications, such as Telecom, Navigation, TT&C or IoT.

Computer Science: careers talk by Alessandro Suglia

Following the keynote lecture on Robotics you can join Alessandro Suglia to hear about his career journey from Heriot-Watt student to the current day. Alessandro is a Tenure-track Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University and affiliated with the National Robotarium. He is interested in teaching artificial agents to truly understand the meaning of words. His research agenda focuses on studying multimodal machine learning techniques that are useful for developing a theory of grounded cognition. He's currently the faculty advisor of the Heriot-Watt team competing in the Amazon Simbot challenge, an international competition on language-guided Embodied Artificial Intelligence. He was one of the main developers of Alana, the Heriot-Watt conversational AI that ranked 3rd in the Amazon Alexa Prize challenge in 2018.

Alongside several academic collaborations, he also completed research collaborations with Amazon Alexa, Meta (Facebook) AI, and Samsung AI about Vision+Language methods for interactive grounded language learning.

In this talk, Alessandro will talk about how important completing a degree in Computer Science was to him for his career. He will show you how, thanks to his background, he was able to create successful robots that can use natural language to interact with humans to solve real-world tasks. Alessandro will show you some real-world applications that Heriot-Watt has built in collaboration with Amazon Alexa to solve very important problems in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.