About Professor Danielle George

Professor Danielle George is Vice Dean for Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Science and Engineering and a Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering at The . She completed her BSc in Astrophysics, MSc in Radio Astronomy at The Victoria University of Manchester based at , and her PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering with UMIST. She worked at Jodrell Bank Observatory as a senior Radio Frequency Engineer until 2006 when she took up a lectureship post in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. She was awarded a Professorship at the age of 38.

Danielle’s expertise in radio frequency and microwave communications has a wide range of applications across a number of industries. To date most of her research and development work has been carried out on a variety of aspects relating to ultra-low noise receivers for Space and Aerospace applications. She is involved in the $1B astronomical instrument, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), is the UK lead for amplifiers for the $1B Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope and has worked with NASA and ESA on the development of instrumentation for researchers exploring the . She has worked with agriculturists on the development of instrumentation to measure water usage and with a number of multi-national companies such as Rolls Royce where she worked on industrial gas turbine engines.

Danielle has been privileged to present The 2014 Christmas Lectures, which she also took to Singapore and Japan later in 2015. Danielle was a speaker at the acclaimed TEDGlobal Conference 2015, she was a guest on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific and The Infinite Monkey Cage, and was keynote speaker at the Contemporary Great Conference, as part of the Great North Greats celebratory events in her hometown of Newcastle- upon-Tyne. 2016 was been a big year for Danielle as she gave the prestigious Cockcroft Rutherford Lecture, was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Rooke Award for public promotion of Engineering and was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2016 Birthday Honours for services to engineering through public engagement. In 2017 Danielle presented Invented in the North West, the Time Watch episode Decoding Disasters, Hyper Evolution: Rise of the Robots, and co-presented Search for a New Earth for the BBC.

Following on from the success of Danielle’s Christmas Lectures, the Manchester Robot Orchestra was formed by The University of Manchester in association with The European City of Science and supported by the EPSRC, Siemens, The Granada Foundation and The University of Manchester Science and Engineering Research and Innovation Hub. The Robot Orchestra involves young people learning computer coding and recycling things to make robot instruments. The Robot Orchestra performed at the Euroscience Open Forum, the Manchester Science Festival, the Science Museum, London, and went on tour across the UK with the Royal Institution in early 2017 with Danielle’s Hack Your Home: a New Revolution show. The Robot Orchestra then featured in a BBC iPlayer documentary Can a Robot Replace Ed Sheeran?, presented by Radio 1 DJ Greg James and including Professor Noel Sharkey, part of which was filmed in the iconic Maida Vale studios in London. Behind the Scenes footage of the Robot Orchestra appears on BBC Make it Digital along with a music video filmed in Eastlea Community School, Newham, London called What if … Robots Replaced Teachers?

Danielle is passionate about raising public awareness of the positive impact engineering has on all aspects of our everyday lives and highlighting to young people the immense depth and breadth of opportunities a career in engineering can offer. Danielle is an Ambassador for the BBC Learning Science campaign and President of the Association for Science and Education for 2017. She is also on the National Advisory Group for the Future Teaching Scholars Programme.

The middle one of three sisters, Danielle grew up in Newcastle where her parents still live. Fascinated by science from an early age, she was given a telescope by her parents when she was eight years’ old and would regularly get up in the middle of the night to watch lunar eclipse. She credits this experience as the moment she first realized how physics and mathematics could be applied in a practical sense outside the classroom and as the first step on her path to her current career.

She now lives in Manchester with her husband, Richard, and daughter, Elizabeth.

You can follow Danielle on Twitter at: @EngineerDG

Your can follow the Robot Orchestra on Twitter at: @robotsmcr