The Wessex Institute of Technology (usually referred to as just Wessex Institute or WIT) is an educational institute offering higher degrees validated by the University of Wales

University of Wales

The University of Wales was a confederal university founded in 1893. It had accredited institutions throughout Wales, and formerly accredited courses in Britain and abroad, with over 100,000 students, but in October 2011, after a number of scandals, it withdrew all accreditation, and it was...

, located at Ashurst Lodge in the New Forest National Park, in the south of England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

.

The overall aim of Wessex Institute is to develop a series of knowledge transfer mechanisms, particularly directed towards the exchange of information between academics and professional users within industry.

This is achieved through a range of activities organised by staff of the Institute and its associate companies. A large network of contacts and links have been established with many organisations throughout the world.

Core activities

• Graduate Programmes at Doctoral and Master
  Master's degree
  A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
  
   level, many in collaboration with other academic institutions throughout the world.
• Specialist Research within the areas of Damage Mechanics, Environmental Fluid Mechanics, Industrial Research and Information Communications Technology.
• International Conference Programme which is constantly expanding in both size and scope.
• Publishing Arm: The Institute has a publishing arm which produces numerous scientific books, monographs and edited works as well as the proceedings from the Institute’s conference programme.

Graduate programmes

Several International Master Programmes are available covering areas such as Information and Communications Engineering, Environmental Modelling and Computer Aided Engineering.

Major research divisions

• The Damage Mechanics Division is involved in the development of complex computational methods, including boundary element techniques for stress analysis problems.

• The Environmental Fluid Mechanics Division is dedicated to the modelling of environmental and fluid dynamics phenomena including applications of high performance computing to the solution of problems in science and engineering.

• The Industrial Research Division concentrates on solving problems of importance to industry and demonstrates the significance that Wessex Institute attaches to producing practical research. The division also carries out an intensive programme to train professional engineers in the latest techniques for advanced engineering design.

• The Information and Communications Engineering Division is concerned with a variety of areas of research related to the latest developments including Management Information Systems, Data Mining and Web-based technologies. The division has links with many countries and collaborates in the organisation of joint research and training programmes at postgraduate level.

Recent research achievements and activities

• The current research programmes at the Institute continue to be supported by the EU, NATO, industry and other prestigious organizations.
• The International Master Programme on Information Systems. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, which is supported by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office attracted students from the Ukraine. A number of students who have completed their Master degree are now registered on full-time PhD
  PHD
  PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
  
   programmes at this Institute.
• The International Master Programme in Environmental Electromagnetic Compatibility organised by the Wessex Institute and administered by the British Council supported a number of Croatian students. Some are currently registered on the PhD programme at WIT.
• The Prigogine Medal, in memory of the late Ilya Prigogine
  Ilya Prigogine
  Ilya, Viscount Prigogine was a Russian-born naturalized Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.-Biography :...
  
  , Nobel Prize
  Nobel Prize
  The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
  
   in Chemistry, has been awarded annually since 2004 in collaboration with the University of Siena
  University of Siena
  The University of Siena in Siena, Tuscany is one of the oldest and first publicly funded universities in Italy. Originally called Studium Senese, the University of Siena was founded in 1240. The University has around 20,000 students, nearly half of Siena's total population of around 54,000...
  
  .

International conference programme

Wessex Institute organises an extensive annual meetings programme, including short courses, seminars and conferences. Short courses usually take place at Ashurst Lodge, whilst about 25 international seminars and conferences are held in many different locations around the world in association with other organisations and universities. Originally focused on physical sciences and engineering, the range of topics covered by the meetings has expanded to cover a wide variety of fields ranging from ecology to finance. Proceedings are published in book format and online through the Transactions of the Wessex Institute of Technology with over 20,000 papers available.

Notable contributions include papers promoting intelligent design

Intelligent design

Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...

 creationism

Creationism

Creationism is the religious beliefthat humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic god. As science developed from the 18th century onwards, various views developed which aimed to reconcile science with the Genesis...

 from Dominic Hassler, Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at Oral Roberts University

Oral Roberts University

Oral Roberts University , based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the United States, is an interdenominational, Charismatic Christian, comprehensive university with an enrollment of about 3,790 students from 49 U.S. states along with a significant number of international students from 70 countries...

 ("The Coherence of an Engineered World"), and a joint paper by Scott A. Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer

Stephen C. Meyer

Stephen C. Meyer is an American scholar, philosopher and advocate for intelligent design. He helped found the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute , which is the main organisation behind the intelligent design movement. Before joining the DI, Meyer was a professor at...

 reiterating claims disputing evolution of the bacterial flagellum.

External links

• WIT Website - Wessex.ac.uk
• WIT Press Publishing - Witpress.com