Ashok Kumar Fellowship
Applications for the 2024 Ashok Kumar Fellowship are now closed.
The Ashok Kumar Fellowship provides funding for one successful candidate each year to spend three months working at the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST).
The post-holder produces a short briefing paper, contributes to a longer report, assists a select committee in a current inquiry, and/or carries out related activities on an area of public policy related to science and engineering. The topic of the work is selected by POST or the relevant parliamentary team.
The Fellowship is jointly funded by IChemE and the Materials Processing Institute.
Who was Ashok Kumar?
Ashok Kumar was the only serving chemical engineer in UK Parliament at the time of his sudden death in March 2010. An IChemE Fellow, Kumar had been the Labour MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland since 1997, his second spell in parliament following a brief stint in 1991. Prior to his career in politics, Kumar spent 14 years working as a research scientist for British Steel at the Teesside Technology Centre in Grangetown. From that background he took with him a strong conviction of the importance of industrial research and development to the UK’s economy.
Previous fellowship briefing notes examples
- POSTnote 697 - Data science skills in the UK workforce by Josh Fearns, a chemical engineering graduate at the University of Surrey, UK
- POSTnote 684 – States’ use of cyber operations by Amber Keegan, a chemical engineering postgraduate student at the University of Sheffield, UK
- POSTnote 596 – Chemical weapons by Jennifer Spragg, a postgraduate student in bioenergy at the University of Leeds, UK
- POSTnote 575 - Fire Safety of Construction Products by Erin Johnson, a postgraduate student at Imperial College London, UK
- POSTnote 540 - Nuclear Security by Akshay Deshmukh, a postgraduate chemical engineering student at Yale University, Connecticut, US