Professor Mark Miodownik Freng
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PROFILE HIS MARVELLOUS MATERIALS Professor Mark Miodownik FREng It has not always been easy balancing work as a university researcher with that of a media celebrity. However, after 10 years walking this tightrope, Professor Mark Miodownik FREng feels that that there is now a greater understanding of both his subject and why interacting with the media is important. Michael Kenward interviewed him at the Institute of Making he has helped create at UCL. The early steps of Mark Miodownik’s University of Oxford and then went on to personal journey are well known. His best- study for a PhD working on new alloys for selling account of materials that have jet engines. Sponsored by GEC, he had, shaped the world, Stuff Matters (winner of in the meantime, spent a year in industry the Royal Society’s 2014 Winton Prize for looking at the materials science of failures in Science Books), begins with his account of big turbines for electricity generation. The being assaulted as a schoolboy by a razor- experience put Miodownik off an industrial wielding beggar. The razor attack started career. “I just wasn’t enthused because it was a fixation with materials. How could this 9am to 5pm office work, and people left on thin sliver of steel do so much damage to the dot of 5pm. I was left wondering where his precious leather jacket, not to mention the engineering passion was in the company.” several layers of skin? Not much has changed, it seems. His analysis of the weapon used to attack followed on from his home life. His father, Miodownik complains that “an enormous an academic metallurgist at the University of whiff of the 19th century still hangs over a Surrey, kept tools and a workshop at home. lot of UK manufacturing”. It often doesn’t “He was the sort of person who would have provide a place for young engineers to a go at mending most things. When you develop their ideas. “If UK industry and have a dad like that, you absorb it. I had manufacturing want more innovative an enormous infusion of making, materials people, and they want more of the best and and engineering.” the brightest, then have to compete with After school, Miodownik took on what other types of industry are offering in a materials engineering degree at the terms of the working environments.” INGENIA ISSUE 61 DECEMBER 2014 43 Professor Mark Miodownik FREng PROFILE He believes that engineering in general needs to place more value on communication skills. These are often seen as some of the ‘soft skills’, a label that Miodownik dismisses as, “a derogatory term that we should get rid of, as they really are not soft.” It also helped that his PhD project was in a communication skills. These are often had corollaries in living substances.” After NESTA invited Miodownik, then Head of the research group led by Dr John Martin, whose seen as some of the ‘soft skills’, a label that all, he adds, the physics and the length Materials Research Group at King’s, to take scales are the same. Miodownik’s work its money to develop the library. “It was a interests spread beyond the narrow confines Miodownik dismisses as, “a derogatory term concentrated on studying self-organisation magic moment. All of a sudden something of metallurgy. “He taught me a lot about the that we should get rid of, as they really are and self-healing in materials. “I was really that I thought was really important had personality of materials science.” not soft.” interested in knowing to what extent a funder, without even having to apply. With his PhD in aerospace alloys With his own communications skills, Miodownik could have done something there was any connection between them. Which was great!” completed, Miodownik’s career started on really radical and become a full-time media The materials that you find in biology are a traditional path. Still looking for a job, he pundit. Over the years, he has contributed to very highly optimised.” He thought that worked as a post-doc in Oxford as what he TV programmes, newspaper columns, regular looking at biological systems would be NEXT CAREER MOVE describes as a “researcher-for-hire”. He helped Miodownik moved, with his research team radio appearances and work with various a good way to find new materials that and their materials library, to UCL in 2012, a manufacturing company that was having arts bodies. He could have abandoned the engineers could exploit. where his full title is Professor of Materials problems making tungsten carbide tools for lab for the studio. But Miodownik insists “I Then, the National Endowment for and Society. “I wanted to make a statement extruding copper pipes. have no desire to be a full-time presenter nor Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) that when you do engineering it is human Miodownik’s knowledge of extruding a full-time media person. The only reason got wind of another of Miodownik’s ventures, and it is to do with society, it is to do with copper pipe was stuck at undergraduate why I am useful to newspapers and the BBC the library of materials that he had begun to culture.” The importance of ‘society’ in level and he knew next to nothing about is because I know what I’m talking about assemble in 2003 at Kings College. engineering underlies recent changes in tungsten carbide. His solution was to ask and that is because I’m fully immersed with As a young academic, says Miodownik, UCL’s approach to teaching engineering. questions that explored the process from science and engineering in my day job.. “I would go to research conferences, and scratch. He quizzed the company on what it nobody would have the materials there that UCL’s integrated engineering was doing, which turned out to be working they were talking about.” The absence of programme is, says Miodownik, moving with some complicated geometry. Then he TOP MODELLER samples puzzled Miodownik, especially when from teaching the subject as latter-day talked to people who had spent a lifetime With his contract research project out of it came to teaching undergraduates about engineers taught it. Traditionally this working with the material and asked them the way, Miodownik began to climb the materials that he had barely encountered. “It meant three years learning the basics of academic ladder, beginning in 2000 as engineering before students addressed how they joined complex tungsten carbide is very intimidating when you have just done Professor Mark Miodownik FREng a lecturer at King’s College London with real-world problems. “The point is not to parts, which was essentially to use vacuum a PhD on one particular alloy and someone research on metals. Around the middle leave that to the end, because by that furnaces. “And then I just did it!” asks you about carbon fibre composites. I At the moment, he feels that they are going and telling people the engineering does of the decade, Miodownik added very started collecting samples as a way both point students often think that engineering The project not only came up with a into design and consultancy companies, something exciting, it actually has to be different materials to his research interests. to understand the spectrum of materials is just about solving equations”, explains patent, it also brought home to Miodownik where there are great perks, like a flexible exciting at all levels of the business. No Before entering academia, he had worked and so that I could teach it to other people.” Miodownik. “We are turning that around the value of communication. “I suddenly working environment where engineers can one should have to do a mundane and as a postdoctoral fellow at Sandia National The collection kept growing. People started and saying that engineering is about realised how easy it was to solve a problem. take one day off every two weeks to do monotonous job in an engineering firm.” Laboratories in the US. While there, building knocking on his door: they weren’t interested solving problems, and all of those their own projects. “The big manufacturing You can do your job 10 times faster if you on his PhD, he became an expert in the in talking to him, they just wanted to look at problems are human problems. So, first of companies have got to offer the same can ask the right questions and get the right computer modelling of alloys. He had picked the collection. all, you have to understand the humans lifestyle if they want the best people. I can’t ANALYSING ALLOYS answers. Communication skills are not just up awards for his work on developing The library had another purpose. and the problems. Then you need to understand why they don’t spend more When it came to moving forward in his own important to promote a subject, they are computer simulation methods to understand “People get addicted to a very small set of understand the kind of solutions that are time and effort trying. It is almost as if they career, Miodownik admits that “like a lot of important to be a better engineer.” the effect of thermo-mechanical processing materials, which they just use again and going to be socially acceptable, politically want the solution to more engineers and people I didn’t quite know what I should be Mark Miodownik is a passionate on metal alloys. again and again because they know how acceptable, economically viable. Then, more status for engineering to be solved doing”. A PhD seemed like a good idea: “I communicator.