Partners
Our centre is unique in the strength of its links with industry matched with high quality research methodology. We achieve this by working with leading industries that recognise and support the need for highly skilled researchers.
STOR-i meets the need to produce highly employable graduates equipped with the broad skills needed for rapid career progression. Our industry partners pledge significant financial support and have committed to extensive, long-term involvement in the Centre’s activities. Strong industry involvement has been key to STOR-i’s continued success.
STOR-i is committed to developing and disseminating research of direct relevance to industry and government as well as to the academic community. To this end, STOR-i hosts an annual conference to showcase research progress and achievement. The workshops are open to our industrial partners, visiting PhD students and our external advisers.
Industry Partners
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Here you will find a list of our industry partners with current PhD Projects and partners that contribute to the programme in terms of training.
- Aimia
- ATASS
- BT
- Datasparq
- DSTL
- EDF Energy
- Howz
- Janssen
- KSS Fuels
- Met Office
- Metocean Risk Management department within JBA Consulting
- Morgan Stanley
- NAG
- National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL)
- Network Rail
- Office for National Statistics (ONS)
- Quanticate
- Roche
- Rolls Royce
- Royal Mail
- Shell Research
- Sparx
- Tesco
Below is a list of partners where STOR-i students have done internships.
- AMRC with Boeing
- BT
- Coeliac UK
- EDF Energy
- Lubrizol UK Limited
- MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge
- Office for Nuclear Regulation
- Shimadzu
- Sky Betting and Gaming
- Sparx
- Unilever Research
Below is a list of other partners that contribute to the programme.
- AstraZeneca
- BCA Logistics
- decisionLab
- Eon
- FatMedia
- IBM
- InTouch Ltd
- JBA Trust
- Kognitio
- Optrak Distribution Software Ltd
- Perceptive Engineering
- SAS
- Scottish and Southern Energy
- Scraperwiki
- Smith Institute
- UCL
- Unilever
- VYPR
- West Yorkshire Police
- Winton Capital Management Ltd
Below is a list of industrial partners we have worked with in previous years. Click on the company name to visit their website and find out more about the company.
- Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA)
- Garrad Hassan
- Man Investments
- MBDA
- BioSS
- Ernst and Young
- Office for National Statistics (ONS)
- Winton Capital
Disclaimer: This page contains hypertext links to third-party websites. We are not responsible for any content contained on third-party websites and any links from the STOR-i website to third-party websites does not constitute an endorsement of these sites. If you access any third-party websites through hypertext links on this website, you do so entirely at your own risk.
Academic Partners
As part of STOR-i’s international working, we have developed major strategic academic partnerships with Big Insight (Oslo, Norway), MIT (Cambridge, US), Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, US), Northwestern University (Evanston, US), University College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland) and University of Washington (Seattle, US). These key cross-disciplinary centres also have international research reputations and aligned agendas to STOR-i.
The nature of each of these academic partnerships is to:
- Foster longer-term collaborative research opportunities between the groups;
- Enable researchers in each organisation to spend extended visits with one another leading to a range of new collaborations between staff directly;
- Provide opportunities for students at the different centres to visit and work with each other;
- Facilitate academics from Naval Postgraduate School and Statistics for Innovation to actively co-supervise STOR-i students, and vice versa; and
- Collaborate on the design and delivery of joint workshops and training events.
Big Insight
Big Insight, based at the Norwegian Computing Center/Norsk Regnesentral in Oslo, is one of the fourteen Norwegian Centres for Research-based Innovation. Big Insight develops core statistical methodologies to achieve innovation goals in four key sectors: petroleum, finance, marine and health.
MIT
MIT’s Operations Research Center (ORC) is the world’s premier graduate program in operations research (OR).
Naval Postgraduate School
The Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, provides master and doctoral training programmes in a diverse range of disciplines with the ultimate aim to improve national security.
Northwestern University
The Department of Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences (IEMS) at Northwestern University provides doctoral training in operational research, engineering statistics, production and logistics, financial engineering, healthcare engineering, and social network analysis. IEMS has particular strengths in optimisation, stochastic simulation, and data analytics methodology, and is the #4 ranked doctoral program in the United States by U.S. News & World Report.
University College Dublin
The Statistics Group at UC Dublin is part of the highly regarded School of Mathematics and Statistics. The School is the largest of its kind in Ireland and offers the greatest choice of programmes at undergraduate, master's and PhD level, reflecting the ubiquity of the mathematical sciences in the modern world.
University of Washington
The Department of Statistics at the University of Washington is one of the strongest and most diverse Statistics groups in the USA. The department has a range of strengths that link with, and support, cross-departmental research at the University of Washington. Like STOR-i, the Statistics Department engages closely with industrial partners, in particular, Seattle-based companies such as Microsoft and Amazon.
Prospective Partners
Industrial partners greatly add to the rich variety of research collaborations on offer to STOR-i students. If you would like to explore possible collaborative opportunities with your organisation or arrange to visit the centre, please contact STOR-i.
Working with STOR-i
Our model is based on the tried and tested UK Research Council’s CASE PhD scheme. We will collaborate on a project, which addresses key questions arising from your business requiring leading-edge statistics and/or operational research. For examples of existing projects, please visit our research page. A specific PhD student will work on the project for 3 years under the supervision of a STOR-i academic. Our model also encourages additional supervision provided by a member of the partner’s staff. You will gain access to STOR-i’s unique range of industrial engagement and knowledge transfer activities offering benefits not available in standard academic-industrial project collaborations.
We have found that consultancy projects do not tend to be suitable for PhD projects due to the short time frames required to achieve project deliverables. In addition, such projects tend not to contain substantive research problems that are essential for the successful completion of a PhD.
What are the Benefits?
By collaborating on a project, you will work with a highly motivated research student skilled in statistics and operational research. Training during their MRes has specifically prepared them for collaborative research with industry. They will work on this project for the three years of their PhD allowing either substantive long-term projects to be addressed or a series of inter-linked shorter projects. Your organisation will collaborate with the student’s supervisor, an academic within Lancaster University’s internationally recognised statistics and operational research groups.
There will be opportunities to network with other STOR-i students - like-minded, high potential students with a proven record of academic excellence and a focus on careers at the interface of statistics, operational research and industry. Don’t take our word for it – take a look at the list of organisations already partnering with STOR-i. Other benefits include access to STOR-i research activities including our seminars, research group meetings and a range of other knowledge exchange events designed to help our partners find out about the centre’s activities and network with colleagues in other industrial sectors.
Input from Industry Partners
All industrial partners make a modest financial contribution to the project. This money enhances the stipend for the student over and above our standard stipend for STOR-i studentships (encouraging recruitment to the project) and contributes to other activities within STOR-i. We additionally require supervision time to provide problem specific input and help ensure the effective integration of the project within your organisation.
We ask for travel and subsistence costs for the student when working on placement with you, their partner. Such placements provide a valuable opportunity for knowledge exchange between student and partner. There is no fixed model for such visits, with placement types varying between partners and projects. Typically, students spend between 1-2 months a year at the partner’s offices. These visits can be anything from several two-day visits on a regular basis or one longer visit per annum. More frequent, shorter visits have the advantage of ensuring regular input into the project and good team building with the industrial supervisor. Longer visits can ensure better integration of both the work and student within the partner organisation. We would be happy to work with you to identify the visit plan which best suits your needs.
Contact Us
Please get in touch for more information on how your organisation can work with STOR-i.
Professor Idris Eckley FLSW
Distinguished Professor of StatisticsChangepoints and Time Series, DSI - Foundations, Energy Lancaster, STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training