Member Article

PhD graduate boosts Northumberland workforce

An employee with a Northumberland company is celebrating his graduation from Newcastle University with a PhD after being sponsored through the course. Ryan McGlen, from Ashington, works as an applications research engineer at Thermacore, a company that provides thermal cooling solutions for a variety of applications including electronics, military and medical systems.

He gained his PhD in Microchannel liquid cold plates and loop Thermosyphon heat transfer technology. Thermacore have said that this knowledge will be highly valuable to the company.

Ryan said: “I’m grateful to Thermacore for sponsoring me through this qualification. The PhD has been a tremendous help to me as it has helped me gain so much more technical knowledge, expertise and commercial awareness that I can directly apply to my job. “I would have never been able to gain this qualification without being in employment, but it was very hard to combine full time work and study although the company offered excellent support throughout.”

The American company, based in Ashington’s Wansbeck Business Park, was attracted to the site by Northumberland County Council (NCC) which highlighted the benefits of personnel from local universities.

Graham Adams, from the NCC said: “Thermacore’s sponsorship of PhD students is a great example of partnership and enterprise. The skilled job opportunities the company provides is an incentive to local students like Ryan to train and equip themselves for high quality jobs. This is a win-win situation and it is great news for Ashington and Northumberland.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .