University of Nottingham

The Nottingham Geospatial Institute (NGI) is part of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham. The Faculty has 2,800 undergraduate and 1,000 postgraduate students in the UK. It has approximately 375 research active staff and incorporates many world-class Research Groups, Centres and Institutes. It has annual research awards in excess of €27million and a total research portfolio of over €100m from Research Councils, Industry, the UK government and the European Union. The Faculty is organised into several departments; the NGI is part of the Division of Infrastructure and Geomatics. The Faculty of Engineering has the research support mechanisms in place to support this with a research support office that includes HR and recruitment support, project mentoring and management support.

The NGI was formed very recently, in September 2011, from the amalgamation of the Institute of Engineering Surveying and Space Geodesy (IESSG), and the Centre for Geospatial Science (CGS). The NGI has 30 academics and 14 researchers, and a large multidisciplinary research portfolio, with a particular emphasis on knowledge transfer. The NGI has earned global renowned for its cutting-edge research in satellite navigation and positioning systems including the specialist fields of ionospheric scintillation monitoring and impact analysis, geospatial science, photogrammetry, remote sensing, sensor integration and geographical information systems. The diversity of its work, spanning engineering surveying to unmanned aerial vehicles, has led to exciting and innovative collaborations across departments and with other institutions. The IESSG itself was formerly known as the Nottingham Surveying Group, and has been active for almost 40 years. Technological revolution has been a striking feature of this period, with major advances in terrestrial opto-mechanical equipment, automated acquisition systems, and the development of satellite-based systems such as Transit, GPS and GLONASS, EGNOS and the European Galileo system.

The NGI has an industry-led research profile and is well equipped with state of the art equipment and software, including latest generation surveying equipment and GNSS receivers, GPS ionospheric scintillation monitor receivers both onsite and deployed at remote locations, Spirent GNSS signal simulator, GNSS data processing software, and a state of the art Navigation Test Vehicle equipped for real time high accuracy navigation testing. The NGI is one of the few university-based satellite positioning research groups in Europe to have been involved in almost every key stage of the Galileo development program.