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In March 2023, the government published its UK Science and Technology (S&T) Framework which set out the ’five technologies that are most critical to the UK’: quantum technologies, semiconductors, engineering biology, artificial intelligence, and telecommunications. In this Critical Conversations series we will hear from those at the forefront of developing these critical technologies.
Professor Mather is a Chair in Emerging Technologies and working to create the next generation of quantum sensors to transform the way we sense the world around us, while Professor Coveney brings theory, algorithms and software into direct confrontation with existing quantum devices.
Critical conversations series
Our future Critical Conversations will explore the other four critical technologies and broadcast on ‘LinkedIn Live’ from July 2023 to spring 2024.
Bringing together the thoughts of leading experts from across the Academy’s networks, our critical conversations explore issues of relevance to global professional engineering community and wider society. Fellows, awardees, and engineering partners gather to tackle topical issues of relevance to the global professional engineering community and wider society.
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Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE
Hayaatun is CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation. She co-chairs with the Science Minister the government’s Business Innovation Forum and co-chaired with Sir Lewis Hamilton his Commission on improving Black representation in motorsport. She is a trustee of various charities, member of the government’s Levelling Up Advisory Council and Digital Skills Council and NXD at construction company Laing O’Rourke. She has been named as one of the ‘Inspiring 50’ women in tech in Europe and one of the most influential women in both UK engineering and UK tech. She has a Masters in Biochemistry (MBiochem) from Oxford and a PhD from Cancer Research UK/UCL. She is a Fellow of the IET, Honorary Professor at UCL and Honorary Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford. She has received honorary doctorates from UCL, Imperial College London, Newcastle, Brunel, Huddersfield and Southampton, as well as a Science Suffrage Award and the Engineering Professor’s Council President’s Medal. She was a finalist for the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award and was made a CBE for services to International Engineering in 2019. Prior to her current roles, she was Deputy CEO at the Academy and served as Committee Specialist and later Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee.
Professor Peter Coveney FREng
Professor Peter Coveney FREng is Professor of Physical Chemistry, Honorary Professor of Computer Science, and Director of the Centre for Computational Science (CCS) and Associate Director of the Advanced Research Computing Centre at University College London (UCL). He is also Professor of Applied High Performance Computing at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Professor Adjunct at the Yale School of Medicine, Yale University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Member of Academia Europaea. Coveney is active in a broad area of interdisciplinary research including condensed matter physics and chemistry, materials science, as well as life and medical sciences in all of which high performance computing plays a major role. The most recent research area within which Coveney has become active is quantum computing where he is specifically concerned with seeking to assess the feasibility of realising quantum advantage from its application to the solution of molecular electronic structure problems. This field is currently a very active one, but confronting theory with actual quantum devices is arguably the most important aspect of work in this field today, despite the paucity of people participating in such research. Professor Coveney has made outstanding contributions across a wide range of scientific and engineering fields, including physical chemistry, materials science & engineering, computer science, chemical engineering, high performance computing and biomedicine, Validation, Verification and Uncertainty Quantification (VVUQ) and quantum computing, much of it harnessing the power of supercomputing to conduct original research at unprecedented space and time scales. He has shown outstanding leadership across these fields, manifested through running multiple initiatives and multi-partner interdisciplinary grants, in the UK, Europe and the US. His achievements at national and international level in advocacy and enablement are exceptional.
Professor Melissa Mather
Melissa carried out a Bachelor of Applied Science (Hons), majoring in physics, at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. This was followed by a PhD (2003) studying the evaluation by ultrasound of radiation sensitive polymer gels, carried out in the Centre for Medical, Health and Environmental Physics at QUT. In May 2003 Melissa took up an appointment as research fellow in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham. In 2008 Melissa was awarded a 3-year National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Strategic Fellowship within the Biomaterials group. In 2011 Melissa joined the Institute of Biophysics, Imaging and Optical Science (IBIOS), University of Nottingham to take up the award of an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship. In August 2015 Melissa was appointed Professor of Biomedical Imaging in the Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, Keele University. Melissa was awarded a five-year fellowship from the European Research Council in 2016 to fund her project entitled "TransPhorm - Single molecule imaging of transmembrane protein structure and function in their native state". This project pioneered new technology to enable the proteins found in the membrane of cells responsible for the regulation of cell function and communication to be studied in their natural environment. In 2018 Melissa returned with her whole research group to the University of Nottingham as a full professor in the Faculty of Engineering. In February 2023 she was awarded a Chair in Emerging Technologies from the Royal Academy of Engineering to pursue a 10-year programme of work developing integrated diamond photonic platforms for the next generation of quantum sensors. This work aims to move existing quantum sensing instrumentation from complex assemblies to integrated devices suitable for adoption by non-specialists. It is anticipated that this work will unlock new applications for diamond-based quantum sensors feeding into high-performance markets and sectors including healthcare, food security, advanced materials, defence and battery technology. Most recently Melissa commenced a secondment to the Government Office for Science where she is working within the Emerging Technologies team.