TransiT Programme Manager

Position Title: TransiT Programme Manager

Grade and Salary:Grade 9 - £59,390 - £70,878 per annum

FTE and working pattern: Full-time, Fixed term until June 2029

Reward and Benefits
:33 days annual leave, plus 9 buildings closed days for all full time staff.

TransiT is the UK’s largest research hub dedicated to rapidly decarbonising transport through digital twinning. The role of Programme Manager is to provide leadership and focus to the team of nearly 100 academic, research and support staff to deliver the objectives of the programme.

The Programme Manager sits on the core Management Team of the Hub with the two programme directors,Prof Greening (Heriot-Watt) and Prof Flynn (Glasgow) and convenes the Transit Research Leadership team of around 10 senior co-investigators. The role includes close liaison with the funder and key stakeholders as well as convening the TransiT Advisory Board and sub-boards.

The TransiT research programme is highly challenging and complex, demanding close collaboration across work packages and challenge led demonstrators.

Research teams need to work in an integrated way in coordination with researchers from a broad range of disciplines.

This leading-edge research environment raises complex challenges that demand creativity and sensitivity to address effectively. The maintenance and enhancement of a collegiate and supportive working environment is essential to the success of the programme. The Programme Manager plays a critical role in maintaining that ethos across the eight institutional partners and the ten integrated research teams.

Led by Heriot-Watt University and the University of Glasgow, this £46 million initiative unites 8 universities and 67 industry partners to address transport decarbonisation. TransiT is creating a Federated Transport System of Systems (FTSoS), integrating digital twins across road, rail, air, and maritime transport modes. The Hub is building national capability in digital twinning by attracting and engaging with a wide range of stakeholders in industry, government and civil society.

The research informs debates in many areas of national policy, including transportation, energy, cyber-security, connectivity and digital twinning. This national research hub is responsible for delivering new knowledge, technical capabilities and policy advisement relating to UK transport decarbonisation priorities through the development of digital twinning.

Digital twinning allows different transport configurations to be tested and developed much faster than real-world engineering projects, until the lowest cost pathway to net-zero carbon emissions is identified.

UKRI and the Department for Transport have committed to support TransiT to take a ‘learning by doing’ approach to test the feasibility of integrated and federated digital twins to inform policy choices.

TransiT has developed four Challenge Led Demonstrators focussed on key multi-modal transport challenges in passenger and freight logistics. These have been supported by close collaboration with critical industrial stakeholders, to address current and future decarbonisation challenges.

Work package research teams focus on common aspects of digital twinning that apply to all demonstrators, covering specialisms such as ontologies, connectivity and cyber-security, human factors, federation and policy. The demonstrators provide real-world context for the testing of approaches developed within the work packages, and raise practical issues to be addressed.

To support common approaches across the demonstrator teams, a Digital Architecture Working Group has been established.

The planning and co-ordination of these research teams is the responsibility of the PM team, which…