The ARBS Education and Research Foundation is fast becoming a leader in supporting education, training and research in the air-conditioning and refrigeration industries.

The Foundation achieves its goals through awarding scholarships and funding practical research activity.

The Foundation is awarding scholarships because it believes a highly skilled and diverse workforce will contribute to better industry productivity.

Collaboration between the Foundation and Engineers Without Borders has led to 2 scholarships being awarded to engineering students from New South Wales. Our scholarships valued at $5000 per student enabled each of them to attend the 2017 Engineers Without Borders design summit. The design summits were held over in February 2017.

Our scholarships were awarded to Divyanshu Virmani a student at UTS Sydney and Rianna Bernal from the University of New South Wales. Both are electrical engineering students.

Through the scholarship Divyanshu and Rianna travelled to Cambodia in February and participated in a professional development program that enabled them to work collaboratively with other scholarship holders and the local community to find solutions to everyday challenges in their local environment. These scholarships are wonderful opportunitiey for students to broaden their view of engineering issues they will work on during their careers while at the same time enhance Australia’s reputation as a provider of humanitarian support.

Foundation chair Ian Hopkins, said,

“we are pleased to join with Engineers Without Borders. They are a wonderful organisation that has an extensive network of connections that are able to bring universities, industry and communities from Southeast Asia together for humanitarian purposes.”

Our scholarship enabled Divyanshu and Rianna to travel to and be active participants in the design summit. They will in due course report back to the foundation board about their experiences.

“By supporting engineering students our industry will become better known and recognised by the university sector,” Ian Hopkins said. He added, “I’ve time more students will seriously consider building careers in our industry.”