 Good morning everyone. My name is Patricia Kiran and on behalf of our accumulated project team, six of whom join us here this morning. The remainder of whom are with us in spirit from lectures, labs and design offices all around the country. I'm delighted to give you this 15 minute introduction to our project entitled as Sarah had said, Irish engineering and graduates advancing global manufacturing competitiveness design simulation for the process industries. This is a chemical engineering project developed in the context of the Irish biopharmaceutical industry. Ireland has become in recent years not just a European hub for the pharma sector but a global hub. Nine of the world's top ten pharmaceutical manufacturers have manufacturing and or higher value process development facilities here in Ireland. This sector contributes significantly to our economy, accounting last year for almost 60% of our exports to a value of over 50 billion. In, even in the last year, very significant developments have been announced by Pfizer, BMS and Regeneron. This is an industry which depends crucially upon chemical engineering graduates and we are proud that our project team includes representatives from all of the chemical engineering departments in Ireland. UCD, represented by Professor Owen Casey, UCC, represented by Dr George Olivera, UL and CIT, those colleagues are in class, in class as we speak, as well as by cognate disciplines from the biosciences and biotechnology. Dr Carmel Hensey from science, biosciences in UCD, Brian Freeland from biotechnology in DCU and from the area of pharmaceutical control engineering, DIT. We're also supported by teaching and learning from UCD and from DCU and because this is a technology enhanced learning project, we have essential and essential support from CIT, from technology enhanced learning, head of department, Dr Garod Osulawain. Our project also depends very heavily on external support, on concrete specified support from external partners, and these include NIBERT, the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training. This is a locally located government funded institution which has a mandate for research and training specifically for the biopharma sector. Scaleup Systems, which is an Irish owned company which has developed and provided a simulation tool called DynaChem, which is the industry standard for process development and simulation for the pharmaceutical sector and which is represented here today by Dr Steve Cropper. APC, a UCD spin off company developed from chemical engineering and providing chemical engineering solutions to the pharma and biopharma and Jacobs, a global engineering design and project management company headquartered in the states but which has developed particular expertise in pharma and biopharma applications in the Dublin office and we're proud to have them as our partners for this project. Both APC and Jacobs are key users of simulation tools which are the focus of our project. They're also key employers of graduates which they're employing to use those simulation tools. And finally, the institution of chemical engineers which is the international professional accreditation body for the chemical engineering profession, accrediting chemical engineering degrees in 60 institutions in Ireland, the UK, Europe, Australia and South America. This project team has been developed specifically with the objective of developing a strategy and supporting resources to allow us to sustainably embed the effective use of discipline specific simulation tools in chemical engineering and cognate programs for the achievement of professionally relevant graduate skills. We're focusing not on simulation tools as an end to themselves but for supporting our students in deepening their understanding of the underpinning chemical engineering principles. We're focusing specifically on biopharma applications which are of such enormous importance to our economy and we want to develop the use of these tools with reference to a theory experiment simulation framework ultimately with a view to enhancing digital literacy among our graduates. Simulation tools for chemical engineers are part of the currency of that digital literacy. Chemical engineering just before we start is often a poorly understood discipline. In lay audiences, polite conversation can often grind to a complete halt when the answer to so what do you do is I'm a chemical engineer so for the benefit of non-chemical engineers in the audience here's a 30 second overview of what it is that we do. Chemical engineers forge the link between chemistry or biology and useful products among them but not limited to pharmaceuticals. What chemical engineers do is they take a process which has been developed at a laboratory scale. They design and develop a process which will allow the production of that product on a large scale. They design the equipment and the plant which is going to be required to implement that process. They will supervise the construction of that facility and ultimately the operation of that facility to produce the product sustainably, reliably, reproducibly in an economically and in an environmental acceptable way. This is obviously a very complex process. No one chemical engineer is doing all of that but chemical engineers are involved in every aspect of it. Simulation tools support chemical engineers in harnessing and combining a quantitative evaluation of chemistry and biology with underpinning chemical engineering sciences such as heat transfer, mass transfer and fluid flow. These are the simulation tools in which we want our graduates to develop further skills. What is it that we're going to do? In chemical engineering curricula in Ireland and elsewhere globally, simulation tools are already commonly used but primarily at senior level where they're typically used by chemical engineering students as part of their final year design projects. These are capstone projects. Students working in teams will be required to undertake every aspect of the design of a plant to produce say a thousand tons per annum of penicillin G of a specified purity. But we want to introduce students to these simulation tools at an earlier stage and in a more structured way as part of a theory experiment simulation approach. A theory we're already covering the theory traditionally and most commonly through lectures. Associated laboratory experiments offer students an opportunity to put the theory in practice but usually only with reference to a specific set of experimental conditions over a one afternoon or a one day laboratory. Simulation tools will allow students to explore these underpinning phenomena with reference to a much wider range of experimental conditions or operating conditions than can be accessed through typical and traditional laboratory experiments. We want students to use these simulation tools not as black boxes to perform poorly understood calculations just simply at the push of a button but in the context of underpinning theory and with reference at least initially in the early stages to physical experimental systems. We're going to focus on applications of farmer relevance and the operations we're looking at are fermentation, chromatography and distillation with process modelling and control interwoven through all three of them. It's not possible to look at it as a standalone process. The commercially available computer based simulation tools that we'll be using will be DynaChem, Aspen One, MATLAB, Simulink and LabView. We aim to produce learning suites associated with each of the key operations for integration into chemical engineering curricula. Our work is rooted in chemical engineering principles. The proposed experimental systems, the one we're focusing on, relate not just to the biopharmaceutical industry specifically but they also build from the expertise and the facilities that we already have in our project team. To use the simulation tools, both students and staff are going to require training. Across institutions and in the face of increasing student numbers, we're going to develop a reusable training resources supported by structured, stage appropriate examples and case studies to allow students to put these principles into practice. What will the project yield? It's going to yield multimedia rich, reusable learning resources accessible to students and staff users in institutions all over Ireland on an open online platform. As we currently anticipated from the experimental systems, we will have validated experimental protocols with defined datasets, those datasets will then be used to seed the modeling and simulation work. We will have media rich representations of the experimental systems or portions of the experiment which will be available to students who may not have access to physical equipment to allow them to perform the experiment or who may have performed the experiment and want to revisit it subsequently to get a different perspective on it or in the context of associated simulation work. There will be screencasts for training in simulation tools, training programs to support largely self-directed student learning in these tools and including opportunities for self-assessment. There will be structured sets of simulated exercises building from very simple exercises that can be directly related into first year and second year laboratory modules to exercises associated with self-directed learning to more complex case studies more appropriate for final year students as they are preparing for the capstone design project. And how are we going to do this? Our work program has been packaged in like most of the projects into a series of work packages and we've got four core work packages each of them relating to the areas we've already identified. Fermentation, chromatography, distillation and process control. This 2D diagram again doesn't show the essential interconnectedness between these different areas. The entire project is going to be prefaced by an initial inception and stakeholder review work package and the resources associated with the multi-media rich learning resources associated with each of these packages will be developed as part of work package 2, e-learning, design and development. Finally integration of the package will be tackled in work package 7 where we will focus on integration both horizontally across different subjects and vertically throughout the student learning cycle adapted for different chemical engineering programs in Ireland. Now how are we going to do this? What are the drivers and the enablers essential for this project? For all engineering graduates professional accreditation is essential. In our case accreditation is by the institution of chemical engineers. It's an internationally recognized mark of the quality of the program and for graduates it's a key step towards becoming a chartered engineer. The ICME already provides and specifies threshold guidelines for achievement in different areas and these are based on learning outcomes. Our use of simulation tools in this particular project will support our programs and our students towards enhanced achievement of relevant learning outcomes in the area of the underpinning chemical engineering principles, chemical engineering practice and chemical engineering design. Chemical engineering is a very diverse field with applications ranging from atomic energy to zeolites. We're going to focus this project specifically on biopharma related applications which will have such enormous economic importance to the country. All of the chemical engineering programs in the country are already affiliated to the ICME so there's already a lot of commonality of approach between our degree programs but individually each of our institutions have developed expertise often historically or related to developments in the area and our project is building on this local expertise harnessing that expertise to share it amongst graduates from all four of the institutions. Our project team is led by academics, mostly chemical engineering academics but given that the biopharma industry is an inherently multidisciplinary undertaking we depend crucially on involvement from cognate disciplines in the biosciences, largely in the biosciences and also from support from technology enhanced learning. Our emphasis on the use of simulation tools is going to allow students to develop their own understanding in core areas but it's also going to better prepare them to play higher value roles as graduates in the pharma sector. We can only best prepare them if we know exactly what it is that the stakeholders want and we have engaged our stakeholders. For the core expertise, just to highlight, pharmaceutical industry is an extremely expensive, high tech, highly regulated industry. We can only do this with the support of NYBURT, the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training which has a GMP designed pilot plant facility based here in Dublin. For the use of the simulation tools, we are indebted to the involvement of a simulation tool provider. And what do we hope to achieve ultimately? In physical terms, a suite of reusable shared learning resources housed on an open online platform which itself builds from a national forum project already being undertaken with CIT, TEL. We're embedding the technology, the theory experiment simulation approach leading to proficiency in simulation tools, the use of simulation tools and techniques. I think one of the most important parts of it is this cross-disciplinary community of engagement helping to prepare our graduates to play those higher value roles and specifically in the education sector, this ChemE TNL community of engagement which is going to be crucial to the rollout of the project as defined by our change management strategy. This is going to raise the profile of the Irish chemical engineering education and also allow us to contribute through the ICME who's actively involved in the project with accreditation standards. And finally, although the framework is for the higher education sector, it's going to be accessible for, as a starting point, for upskilling of graduates already in the bio sector. How will we evaluate it? The ultimate test beyond the lifespan of this 18-month project is the sustained implementation in the Irish chemical engineering curriculum. And this we've tackled through our change management strategy. We want to contribute to accreditation guidelines which will have a lasting impact on graduate development. We will engage employers and the graduates themselves, many of whom are now employers, for evidence of improved graduate preparedness and our students who are integrated throughout the entire process will be part of the stakeholder feedback. The chemical engineering community in Ireland here is excited about this project. We're fortunate to be preparing graduates to enter a very strong, stable and growing graduate market. We see this as an opportunity to better prepare them for higher value roles in a sector, thereby ensuring the stability of the sector for Ireland in years to come. We hope you're as excited about it as we are. Thank you, sir. Thank you.