Prof Terrence Fernando has a broad background in conducting multi-disciplinary research programmes involving a large number of research teams in areas such as urban simulation, virtual building construction and collaborative workspaces. Between 2001 and 2004, Terrence led a EPSRC/OST funded regional research centre on advanced virtual prototyping involving the Universities of Salford, UMIST, Manchester and Lancaster in the UK. This project resulted in developing collaborative visualisation and simulation technologies for the engineering sector. Prof. Fernando was also the Scientific Director of the EU funded CoSpaces project (www.cospaces.org; 17 partners), was a core member of the INTUITION VR Network of Excellence project (www.intuition-eunetwork.org, 50 VR Centres) and a partner in the Visionair project (www.infra-visionair.eu, 25 VR Centres) which developed and demonstrated a range of novel collaborative virtual environments for sectors such as aerospace, automotive, building construction, urban planning. Recently, he has successfully completed three EU projects - Design4Energy (http://www.design4energy.eu/) PROSECO (www.proseco-project.eu/) and CROSS DRIVE (www.cross-drive.eu/) which focused on developing collaboration platforms for creating energy efficient neighbourhoods, eco-products and space mission planning for Mars.

His EPSRC funded projects Vivacity (http://www.vivacity2020.co.uk) and FIRM (EP/H003738/1) led to the development of several collaborative platforms for urban planning. The outcome of this work has resulted in creating unified information models and collaboration platforms for urban planning involving multi-agencies. This work has been deployed in many real world projects in partnership with the Black Country Consortium (defining a 20 year vision), with Salford City Council & multi-agencies (Better Life Chances Project), with Manchester City Council & multi-agencies (Troubled Family Agenda Project) & with Greater Manchester Resilience Forum. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the MOBILISE project (Project MOBILISE (mobilise-project.org.uk) funded by the Global Challenges Research Funds (GCRF) and EPSRC to develop a “Collaborative Multi-agency Platform for Building Resilient Communities” in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Pakistan. This project focuses on developing a digital infrastructure that can offer intelligence to a range of agencies to reduce the impact of disasters such as floods and landslides on communities. He is also the Principal Investigator for the ESRC/GCRF funded project on “Technology Enhanced Stakeholder Collaboration for Supporting Risk-Sensitive Sustainable Urban Development” in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Malaysia (www.transcend-project.org.uk). These projects are addressing a range of research challenges such as a framework for measuring local community resilience, a collaborative technology platform for government agencies and NGOs to work towards in building resilient communities, overcoming challenges in community participation, and stakeholder collaboration in risk sensitive urban design etc.