UK University News

What do engineers do? More precisely, what do schoolchildren think they do?

It’s an important question because the UK is in need of more engineers to reboot the economy and the UK’s manufacturing industry.

The UK Government’s new industrial policies rely on there being a healthy supply engineers, something that is particularly true for the ‘high value’ manufacturing areas based on emerging technologies.  But is being an engineer something that many schoolchildren list when they are asked what they want to be when they grow up?

Tim Minshall, a senior lecturer in technology management in Cambridge’s Engineering Department, is passionate about his profession, but he says he was surprised when he went into a UK primary school and asked a group of 10 year olds to draw him some pictures of engineers. Most of the pictures depicted men fixing cars. Others showed men fixing trains. “The only time many people see the word ‘engineering’ is when there are delayed trains and bus replacement services,” he told an audience at the Hay Festival in early June.

Minshall says the shortage of engineers and children’s perceptions of the profession are linked. “The UK needs more engineers, but engineering is not a thing that young people aspire to be - and this stems from them not really knowing what engineers do. Their perceptions seem to be inaccurate and negative.”

His experience in the UK school made him wonder whether this was specifically a UK phenomenon.  He spoke to his colleagues who come from a broad range of countries and they suggested doing the 'drawing test' in their countries, using a coding system designed to help researchers understand how young students’ perceptions of engineering, engineers, and the work of engineers evolve and are impacted by interventions. The coding system (developed by researchers at Purdue University in the US) aims to provide a standalone measure that can be broadly applied to diverse populations and to create a large multi-institution student database. The idea was that the results could be compared and, if appropriate, used to help inform policymakers in the UK.

At the Hay Festival Minshall unveiled some of the results from Italy. They also depicted people fixing things, but many drew rather glamorous female engineers directing people on building sites.

Italian schoolchildren at the Istituto Teodoro Ciresola in Milan give their view of what an engineer looks like as part of Tim Minshall's project.

So far, the project has included a pilot in the UK, data from Italian schools acquired through an academic visitor from Milan and from Germany via an academic visitor from RWTH Aachen University.  Later this year, data will be captured and analysed from schools in China and Japan.

In the meantime, he has been talking to children around the UK and attempting to counter the myths and enthuse them about what a career in engineering might involve.

At the Hay Festival he summarised what engineers do in 10 words, from inventing to shaping, building to making mistakes [and learning from them] to, yes, fixing things - although not just cars and trains. “Engineers fix the world and we need more young people in engineering to solve the problems we face,” he said.

His talk ranged from the Da Vinci’s sketches of a helicopter to Sikorsky’s engineering brilliance which made the concept work. It covered solar racing cars, upside down cups for babies which never spill, Rolls-Royce jet engines which are specially designed to limit any damage caused by a broken blade to a competition to race a driverless car across the desert, the evolution of mobile phones and development of 3D printing.

Minshall said that some commentators believed 3D printing could revolutionise manufacturing, allowing people to create objects at home and saving shipping costs from abroad.  Low-end 3D printers could also have an important role to play in schools, helping to re-ignite enthusiasm for engineering and manufacturing.

Indeed he and colleagues in the Engineering Department, Judge Business School and Department of Politics and International Studies have recently been awarded funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for a new research project to examine the reality and the potential of digital fabrication for the UK economy. The project will ask how digital fabrication will affect the manufacturing landscape, what impacts this revolution will have on manufacturing in the UK and how UK firms can become global leaders in this new age of digital manufacturing.

Minshall, who has created a blog called whatengineersdo.info, is not stopping with talks and research. Following his appearance at Hay - a literary festival after all - he has been soliciting opinions as to whether there is an appetite for a book aimed at enthusing a future generation of engineers. He was also contacted by the producer of CBBC programme Nina and the Neurons and put them in touch with his students who were asked how they would explain various engineering concepts to children.

His passion for his subject is clear and, he hopes, contagious.

A new spin-out company from the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, XO1 Ltd, has raised $11 million in funding to develop a new anticoagulant drug which has the potential to save millions of lives by preventing heart attacks and strokes without causing bleeding.

The funding, from leading life science investor Index Ventures, will be used to develop ichorcumab, an antibody invented by researchers from the University and Addenbrooke’s, which targets thrombin, the enzyme responsible for blood clotting.

“This is the most exciting drug candidate I have seen in 20 years in the industry,” said Dr David Grainger, Venture Partner at Index Ventures and interim Chief Executive of XO1 Ltd. “It has the potential to save millions of lives.”

Ichorcumab is a synthetic antibody based on a naturally-occurring antibody found in a patient at Addenbrooke’s in 2008. “This patient arrived in A&E with a head injury, and we rapidly discovered a degree of anticoagulation consistent with severe haemophilia,” said Dr Trevor Baglin, Consultant Haemotologist at Addenbrooke’s, part of Cambridge University Hospitals, who treated the patient in question. “We thought it might be fatal. But to our surprise the bleeding stopped quite normally.”

The observation led Dr Baglin - and his colleague Professor Jim Huntington at the University’s Cambridge Institute of Medical Research - to design a synthetic version of the antibody in the patient’s blood that was responsible for this extraordinary anticoagulation.

Anticoagulants, such as warfarin and the newer generation of drugs that directly target thrombin and another coagulation factor (fXa), are widely used to prevent thrombosis - a major cause of heart attacks and strokes. However, as blood clotting is essential to prevent excessive bleeding, the use of these drugs is limited by the bleeding side-effects that they cause. An anticoagulant drug which does not cause bleeding is considered the ‘holy grail’ in this area of research.

“Undoubtedly higher doses of these anticoagulant drugs could prevent the majority of heart attacks and strokes,” Dr Baglin explained. “But we can’t give higher doses because the bleeding they would cause would itself be fatal. Ichorcumab has the potential to change all that.”

“This antibody can deliver a high degree of anticoagulation without increased bleeding; we’ve never seen that before,” said Professor Huntington.

The investment, which comes from the $200 million Life Sciences fund Index launched last year to accelerate new drug discovery, will be used to complete the preclinical development of ichorcumab, and to manufacture substantial quantities of the antibody. “We expect to begin trials in human volunteers within two years,” said Dr Grainger.

“This represents the largest investment in a life science company by Index Ventures to date, underlining the transformative potential we see in this drug candidate,” said Kevin Johnson, Partner at Index Ventures.

The company will operate in virtual mode, without offices or labs, using out-sourced drug development expertise from across the globe. “That approach gives us maximum flexibility to deliver high quality development faster and cheaper,” said Dr Grainger, who is based at the Babraham Research Campus.

“We are delighted to license this exciting asset to XO1, backed by the experienced Index team,” said Andy Walsh of Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm.

For more information on this story, please contact sarah.collins@admin.cam.ac.uk. 

Birth is a momentous event in anyone’s life. When the people involved were absolute monarchs, births had the capacity to shape the narrative of nations. Past royal births are both examples of this most universal of experiences and potent indicators that historians can use to investigate our culture, politics and mores.

As the arrival of the latest royal baby approaches, two public lectures will unravel some of the problems and pitfalls surrounding births of Tudor and Stuart monarchs. The lectures — titled Born to Rule — will shine a light on the history of fertility, pregnancy and childbirth in Britain in the 15th to 17th centuries.

The talks will be given by historians working with the Generation to Reproduction Project at Cambridge University’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science. This cross-disciplinary research group is funded by the Wellcome Trust to investigate the history of reproduction over the long term.

On Tuesday 18 June, Peter Jones, a principal investigator in the Generation to Reproduction project, will talk about Henry VIII’s fertility struggles. Henry forged multiple marriages in the pursuit of a single goal – a healthy male heir who would ensure the continuation of a fragile dynasty.

“Throughout his reign Henry VIII was obsessed by the need to produce a male heir and, ideally, a spare to take the ruling Tudor line forward. Henry’s domestic and foreign policies were shaped by this quest to reproduce and he directed an impressive battery of resources – medical, religious and political – at achieving this aim. Nothing was spared: neither family relationships nor religious affiliations,” said Jones.

Because he broke from Rome, in order to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, it is often assumed that Henry VIII was irreligious. But the evidence for his personal beliefs suggests that he was very devout – and in his quest to sire a child he bought into the quasi-magical practices current at this time.

“When Katherine of Aragon bore him a son – an infant who lived only six weeks – he jumped on a horse and rode from Richmond to the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk where he said prayers of thanks to the Virgin Mary and left a necklace as a thank-offering. Though he’s commonly remembered for his dissolution of the monasteries, he remained pious to the end of his life,” said Jones.

“Henry VIII also clearly believed, as many people did, in the power of rituals involving amulets and prayer rolls. He owned and wrote on such a roll – a manuscript inscribed with devotional prayers – which was to be wrapped around women during childbirth to protect mother and child. He refused to crack down on these superstitious practices.”

For many years there was speculation that Henry’s own fertility problems had been caused by syphilis, a retrospective diagnosis which tapped into his reputation as a womaniser. Medical historians now reject this view: there is insufficient evidence of symptoms of the disease.

A more recent explanation for his shaky fertility is that he carried the gene for the Kell antigen on red blood cells. Most people are Kell-negative and if Henry’s wives were Kell-negative, they would become sensitised once they had conceived a Kell-positive baby. Subsequent Kell-positive pregnancies would be at risk as the mother’s antibodies attacked the baby as a foreign body.

“Interestingly, while in the modern era infertility was often blamed on the woman, there is evidence that in Tudor circles fertility was seen as a matter of balance between men and women. There are, for example, records of tests in which herbs were put into pots of urine from both the man and woman to see which herb grew and thus which partner was fertile. It was more of an open question than a simple assumption that fertility problems stemmed from the woman,” said Jones.

The childbirth drama that unfolded some 150 years later is the subject of the second talk. On Tuesday 25 June, Mary Fissell of John Hopkins University (currently a visiting scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science) will present the gripping story of the birth of James Francis Edward in 1688. The arrival of the so-called “warming pan baby” – a reference to the feverish speculations surrounding his true parentage – is an early example of the media circus that surrounds royal infants.

The birth of James Francis Edward in 1688 at St James’s Palace is said to have been witnessed by no fewer than 42 eminent public figures, assembled to act as verifiers of the legitimacy of the child as legal issue of James II and his second wife, Mary of Modena.  “The pressure on Mary of Modena to produce the sought-after male heir was horrific. She experienced a series of stillbirths and this latest pregnancy had been the source of successive waves of gossip. A fascination with celebrity is nothing new,” said Fissell.

“People doubted that Mary was genuinely pregnant and, once she went into labour, there were reports that the baby who emerged had been smuggled into the bedchamber in a warming pan, or that it had been sneaked into the bed through a secret door in the bedhead.  The routes through which these rumours spread were the cheap broadsheets that were being produced in huge numbers, and read by an ever more literate population, often in the newly popular coffee houses, which were incubators for rumour.”

The warming-pan scandal put a permanent question-mark against baby James’s legitimacy. He never became king. His half-sister, Mary and her husband William of Orange, seized the throne in 1688, in part claiming that succession had failed because James was not the legitimate heir. The deposed King James II and his wife Mary of Modena fled to France from whence their son mounted invasions to reclaim the throne. Later known as the Old Pretender, he was the father of the Young Pretender or, more famously, Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Procreation was a matter of mystery and fear as well as a matter for celebration. “There was no sex education and the process of pregnancy and childbirth was usually a woman’s preserve, unless an emergency required a doctor being brought in. Childbirth was feared, perhaps disproportionately so – but most women would know, or know of, someone who had died in childbirth. One family alone in London had a monopoly in the use of forceps which were a closely guarded secret,” said Fissell.

“My interest in the drama of the warming-pan birth – apart from it being a really good story – is the way in which it was a royal birth but also an ordinary birth, revealing so much about the tussle for power in gender relations. During the Civil War women had risen to unforeseen prominence and with the restoration of the crown there were moves to keep them in check. Ballads, for example, portray them as sexually suspect and promiscuous, meaning that no man was safe from their mischief.”

The talk ‘Henry VIII: the Quest for an Heir’ is on Tuesday 18 June, followed by ‘Mary of Modena: a Royal Scandal’ on Tuesday 25 June. Both lectures will take place in the Little Hall, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge at 5pm. Free and open to all, no need to book.

More about the Generation to Reproduction group at Cambridge University can be found at http://www.reproduction.group.cam.ac.uk/

For more information on this story contact Alex Buxton, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk, 01223 761673

In October 2000, I arrived in Geneva from Stansted airport ready to start a two year research job at the European centre for particle physics (CERN) with my heart in my throat. This was before all of the recent excitement about the Large Hadron Collider, but for a particle physicist, CERN is the ultimate temple of physics and for me, it was my lifetime ambition to work there. I had recently daringly, and many said stupidly, turned down a life-time lectureship at another university so that I might have a chance of working at CERN (the offer came with an inflexible initial start date).

CERN really is an amazing place. There are some 10,000 physicists and engineers working on the site, which straddles the Franco-Swiss border, just outside Geneva, underneath the Jura Mountains. Everyone is working for The Cause - our common goal is to find out what the stuff that makes up our universe is like, and how it behaves.

When I arrived, the Large Hadron Collider had not been built and the previous one was toward the end of its operation. While I was there, there was a potential hint of a higgs signal in the data. All of a sudden, CERN was completely abuzz. Everyone was trying to find out the latest rumours. There were four independent experiments back then, all competing with each other. The idea behind this was that they can check each other's results, and keep each other unbiased. But because of this competition, the experiments were rushing to make a big discovery before the others, but they also wanted to keep their data secret so as not to give the others a clue.

I am a theoretical physicist: I do the mathematics and interpret experimental data, rather than actually run the experiments. My theoretical colleagues had spies on the experiments, which they were trying to push for information to find out the latest on the Higgs boson. Then they would tell their friends, and all sorts of wild rumours would start to fly about. Mostly this wasn't done for any personal advantage, it was just that we were fascinated, and really wanted to know what was going on at the cutting edge as early as possible. Once every month or two, the experiments would hold seminars and do official releases of data. Sometimes we already knew what they were going to say but sometimes it was a surprise.

In the end, it turned out that the hint of a signal that we were all getting so excited about was just a random fluctuation of the data. We couldn't really know this for sure though until we had seen the LHC data, and that didn't arrive for another eight years or so.

At the time though, since there was the hint of a higgs boson signal in the data, and since the collider only had a year or so left before shutdown to make way for the LHC, the accelerator engineers started to ramp up the energy as much as possible. This was a risky strategy, because parts started to break down, being under a lot of strain (I imagine the accelerator engineers, like Scottie from Star Trek, shouting "she cannae take any more captain!") My friend worked on one of the experiments, and many times he was paged from the pub and had to taxi up to the experiment to try and get it working once it had all broken down.

Since the beam was still on, the experiment was losing valuable data that all of the other experiments were taking, and could lose out on a discovery as a result. One time, his boss had to be called in at 1am from a birthday party to coordinate everyone. The first thing to do was pour coffee down him to try to sober him up.

People often think that the biggest man made experiment on earth will be ultra high-tech and efficiently squeaky clean. In some ways this is true, but there was also a sort of Heath-Robinson aspect too. For instance, the accelerator is a complicated beast with thousands of different magnets and sub-pieces, all with complex and nervy feedback across them. As a result, driving it is something of a black art: apparently you get the "feel" of how it is behaving that day and some of the operators were particularly good at this knack. During 1998, the best operators by far were the French accelerator engineers: they just had the most experience, and an uncanny sense of how it would behave in the following five minutes. That year, the football world cup was in France, and we were praying that France would be knocked out early because the rate of good beam was really low: all the good French operators were taking days off to watch their team's matches.

It was hard getting research jobs in the subject back then: the competition was ultra-tough, and I was far from sure I would be able to get the next job. Whenever I thought about leaving the subject, I think how sad I would be to read about a big discovery (like the recent Higgs boson discovery) and to know that I could have been involved, at least in some small way. I really feel that I am super lucky to be still researching in the field. I work from the University of Cambridge, but visit CERN several times a year for research. If you ever go to Geneva, I thoroughly recommend you to get on the CERN website several weeks beforehand, and book yourself in to a guided tour. I guarantee it will be an incredible scientific journey.

Inset image: Ben Allanach working it out during his time at CERN

The University of Cambridge has been recognized as an “Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research” (ACE-CSR) by the UK Government.

The status is further acknowledgement of Cambridge’s long-standing record of world-class research in the field of cybersecurity, in particular within its Computer Laboratory, where there is a well-respected security research group.

In the broadest sense, “cybersecurity” is about protecting activity, assets and services on digital devices and networks from unauthorized interference or attack. In practice, it can mean anything from improving chip-and-pin technology in order to stop banking fraud, to securing government computer networks to prevent hostile attacks from other countries or criminal organisations.

The national scheme to identify British centres of excellence dedicated to cybersecurity is administered jointly by EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) and BIS (the Government's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills). Its aim is to strengthen the links between institutions that are carrying out vital research in this field, and organisations - such as businesses, or the Government itself - that could benefit directly from it.

The initiative also aims to identify technical gaps in UK cybersecurity research, so that they can be addressed by future projects.

Cambridge itself has been responsible for world-leading work on cybersecurity since before the word (or even the Internet) existed: It was at Cambridge, for example, that the use of a one-way function to protect the password file was first conceived and deployed in 1966.

The University’s current work touches on areas of great impact for society such as securing global infrastructure (banking security, smart card security, satellite navigation security, civil infrastructure security) and securing the building blocks of the digital world (operating system security, secure computer architectures, network protocol security, security of mobile devices). Other research addresses the fundamental problem of the interaction between people and computers – the intersection of security and psychology, overcoming the usability and security flaws of password authentication, modelling frauds and scams, protecting location privacy and privacy in social networks, and fighting online censorship.

Much of the University’s work in security research is carried out in close collaboration with commercial and industrial bodies, both in the UK and abroad, with a view to tackling real-life problems. Recent projects have, for example, focused on how to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the computer systems that control major power plants; or on the protection of sensor networks that monitor potential damage to vital infrastructure like bridges and tunnels.

The entrepreneurial spirit of Cambridge academics and graduates has created hundreds of start-up companies, of which several deal with security. Xensource, founded by former Computer Lab staff, and whose Xen hypervisor now runs Amazon’s EC2 cloud (the world’s largest), was acquired by Citrix for $500m in 2007, while nCipher, a maker of cryptographic accelerators founded by a Computer Lab graduate, was bought by Thales for $100m in 2008. Cronto, co-founded by a Cambridge staff member, currently licenses its secure online banking device to major banks in Germany, Switzerland and Chile.

Faculty member Dr Frank Stajano, head of the Cambridge ACE-CSR and an expert in security and privacy based at the Computer Lab, said: “We believe cybersecurity is inherently a systems problem and must be addressed as such.”

“Our strongest asset as a cybersecurity research institution is our unique combination of depth and breadth. We offer a core of systems security expertise at the Computer Laboratory. Through the rest of the University,  we have ready access to world-class domain experts from other disciplines. We are therefore uniquely placed to critically analyse and contribute to all aspects of the cybersecurity problem.”

“No other academic institution in the whole of Europe has the mix of skills, knowledge and creative people to do this as effectively as the University of Cambridge. We are committed to researching long-term solutions to the fundamental cybersecurity problems that will affect the society of tomorrow.”

Further information about Security Research within the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge can be found at: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/ace-csr/

For more information about this story, please contact: Tom Kirk, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge. Tel: +44 (0)1223 332300; Email: thomas.kirk@admin.cam.ac.uk