JANUARY 2001 BROADSHEET - Cambridge-MIT Link and Embedded Research in Cambridge
May we wish our members and readers a very happy new year for 2001, the true millennium, as the Queen said, and we hope you have come through the Christmas and hogmany festivities completely bug free. It has been a long haul since our last Broadsheet and the two meetings at the end of November and mid-December have become rather hazy blurrs.
We had a powerful University line up on 30th November when Dr David Livesey, head of Cambridge's academic teaching and research, Professor Colin Humphreys, Materials Science and Dr Christopher Padfield, head of the University's new Corporate Liaison Office gave an in depth picture of the strong links being forged throughout the world to ensure that the University maintains its position of global supremacy in science and technology.
Dr David Livesey told us how the Chancellor of the Exchequer's propensity for holidays on the eastern seaboard of the United States, brought him into contact with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the realisation that America's economy had been enormously enriched by the entrepreneurial spark produced in its graduates. Over 4000 companies have been founded by them and in 1994, for example, they generated $232 billion, greater than the GNP of Belgium! The upshot was that MIT chose Cambridge to be their partner and Gordon Brown gave the partnership £68M to set up. David was put in charge of forming the Cambridge-MIT Institute (www.cmi.cam.ac.uk) and was on the point of handing over to its permanent head, Professor Alan Windle, up till then Head of Material Science.
Quite by coincidence, our second speaker, Professor Colin Humphreys, (colin.humphreys@msm.cam.ac.uk) had been the previous head of that department. He told us how two very disparate companies had singled out Cambridge to allow them to set up laboratories for their research. One was Rolls Royce Aero-engines and dealt with the metallurgy of turbine blades, which had to withstand temperatures way above the melting point of the alloys available. The other was a small Cambridge company, Thomas Swann, where the uses of Gallium Nitride, a new semiconductor material, which is also a light emitter, were being exploited. For both of these the financial benefits were excellent, especially for large companies, of which there are many other examples from all over the world at Cambridge.
Our third speaker was Dr Christopher Padfield, (cjp1000@cus.cam.ac.uk) also an engineer, who has recently become the Director of the University's new Corporate Liaison Office. He outlined his strategy to enable bottom-up academic leadership and exploitation of opportunities arising from the laboratory bench to find interaction with industry. He emphasised the importance of students as the generators of new ideas and future entrepreneurs and the great need of a live information base of scientific discoveries looking for a market.
In the discussion afterwards, amongst very many topics were two that struck a chord. The first was the abject financial reward for scientists in the UK compared with America, coupled with the vastly richer state of universities over there - MIT was said to be two orders of magnitude richer than Cambridge. The other was the tremendous influence of the present Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. Sir Alec Broers was himself head hunted by IBM in the late 60's. Twenty years later, when he was inveigled back to Cambridge as a Professor, he had to take an enormous drop in salary. Basically, we just don't deserve to be a brain driven country when both technology and education are so poorly regarded and rewarded.
The joint meeting on 12th December with the Chartered Institute of Marketing was also a great success. It attracted 125 people to the sumptuous new setting of Q.ton, the breathtaking conference and health center on the Trinity Science Park, which was master minded by Amanda Stavely. John Murphy, the brand name guru, was a great inspiration, and we all came away with a sample his latest branded product, St Peter's Winter Ale.
The Club is very fortunate in benefiting from the sponsorship of the following organisations:-
There are also other companies who give us generous help with specific meetings and services.
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