James Rand

Project: Micro underwater vehicles for autonomous lake inspection

Supervisors: Dr Alan Hunter, Dr Lee Bryant and Dr Danielle Wain (7 Lakes Alliance/Colby College)

Background

James is a Chartered Engineer with over twenty years of experience, at sea and ashore, as a Marine Engineer Officer in the Royal Navy (RN). This included Senior Engineering posts at the RN Marine Engineering School, Technical Advisor to Foreign Navies, Waterfront Representative for the UK Government to the Saudi Royal Navy, Sea-Going Engineering Head of Department (Chief Engineer) jobs, as well as various specialist technical postings.

After leaving the Royal Navy, James taught Mathematics at a secondary school in Southampton for several years before going self-employed as a jobbing builder and odd job man. Having decided he needs more of a challenge, and to update his technical knowledge especially in the area of computing and informatics, James will be undertaking his WISE PhD project at the University of Bath.

His academic qualifications include an MSc in Mechanical Marine Engineering from University College London and a BEng in Mechanical Engineering from Portsmouth Polytechnic.

An active member of the IMarEST throughout his engineering career, James was instrumental in reforming the Benelux Branch of the IMarEST and was the branch chairman for several years whilst on a job Exchange with the Royal Netherlands Navy as their Gas Turbine Technical expert.

James is undertaking his PhD research into the design, build and especially deployment of low cost, micro underwater gliders for use on extended duration and near real time monitoring missions.  Deployment possibilities for such micro gliders include reservoir water quality monitoring, pollution and clean up and potentially military applications.