Profile

I am an engineer, but also a scientist. If anyone tells you you can’t be both, they are probably boring.

What gets me up in the morning is learning about how the world works – how does electricity work, how does sunlight work, how does sound work?

I somehow figured out a way to get paid to try figure these things out!

I am also lucky that the stuff I help make is all around us, from car bumpers to house-bricks to pints of beer – which is rather satisfying, even if nobody knows about my teeny-tiny contribution.

I have lots of different days – OK I guess some days I stay home, log into my computer once the kids are at school and tackle my to-do list (usually emailing people who have problems with help, or more often, the names of experts they can call).

But most of my work-days I am travelling – I work for a big materials science company and we make all the ingredients for all the stuff around you – bricks, glass, cars, computers, facial scrub… and we have to get these ingredients from mother earth.

Nature has helped us: over billions of years, the earth has twisted and melted and boiled all the rocks so that sometimes, in some places, useful materials can be found – gold nuggets, coal, clay, diamonds and so on. They are all over the place and so I travel a lot, visiting interesting quarries and the interesting factories where they are turned into TVs and magazines and xboxes.

And yes, I *am* saying magazines are made of rocks… you will have to join my chat to find out if that’s really true!

I would love to see if we could somehow get a mentoring network working, a place where young engineers can find more experienced engineers to discuss their career, their subject, anything. I would have loved to have had more mentors when I was younger.

Mentoring portals exist, but they are not known about, and for sure not working as well as they could.

I already spend quite a big portion of my time mentoring, but I would love to make it easier for others – especially I would like to tap into retired engineers. My best mentor was 76 when I met him!