Create the Future

In this special episode of Create the Future we speak to the winners of the 2021 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the creators of LED lighting.

Solid state lighting technology has changed how we illuminate our world. It can be found everywhere from digital displays and computer screens to handheld laser pointers, automobile headlights and traffic lights. Today’s high-performance LEDs are used in efficient solid state lighting products across the world and are contributing to the sustainable development of world economies by reducing energy consumption.

Hear Nick Holonyak Jr, M. George Craford, Russell Dupuis, and Shuji Nakamura recount tales from the 60-year LED lighting development story, reflect on their individual contributions (and that of fellow winner Isamu Akasaki), and discuss the truly remarkable engineering behind LEDs.

To learn more about the winners and the history of LED lighting, visit: https://qeprize.org/winners/led-lighting

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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Veena Sahajwalla is revolutionising recycling.

As the engineering brains behind “green steel” and the world’s first e-waste microfactory, she is leading the way on “green materials” – products and resources made entirely, or primarily, from waste. From plastic bottle derived furniture to steel made from old tires, her goal is for people to see waste not as a problem, but as a useful resource.

In this episode of Create the Future, we speak with Veena about the limitations of conventional recycling and discuss the engineering required to disrupt the status quo. We unpack the environmental and economic benefits of her work, explore the troubling rise of e-waste, and hear how growing up in Mumbai fuelled her lifelong passion for repairing.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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For Yewande Akinola MBE, engineering is all about staying curious, expressing creativity, and imagining the impossible.

Yewande Akinola is an award-winning chartered engineer, communicator, and role model. In 2020, she received an MBE in the Queen’s New Year Honour’s list for services to Engineering Innovation and Diversity in STEM.

Inspired to become an engineer owing to the intermittent water supply she experienced growing up in Nigeria, she now specialises in sustainable water management, working on projects in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

In this episode of Create the Future, we explore Yewande’s varied career, from sustainable waterparks to television presenting on National Geographic. We discuss the importance of engineering mentors, her passion for communication, and how creativity (embracing culture, art, and music) is an essential tool for any engineer.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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With approximately 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface covered in water, the predictable and consistent electricity-generating potential of the oceans remains a largely untapped resource.

In this episode of Create the Future, we speak to Sam Etherington, the engineer and entrepreneur behind Aqua Power Technologies Limited’s innovative wave energy generators.

Inspired by the wingspan of a manta ray, Sam’s new four-metre tall submersible, MANTA, is currently being put to use in offshore fish-farms and aquaculture. Unlike expensive and polluting diesel generators, these devices work instead by simply harnessing the rise and fall of ocean waves.

We explore Sam’s entrepreneurial journey from design and development to manufacturing, unpack how kitesurfing – or more specifically, being buffeted off the board – inspired his work, and learn about the search for simplicity in commercial product design.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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The heart of the biotechnology revolution, biochemical engineering has seen the launch of entire industries. Biochemical engineers work to develop sustainable solutions to some of our greatest challenges – whether that’s creating better biofuels and biodegradable plastics, or advancing large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing during pandemics. 

From the discovery and manufacture of penicillin in 1918, the extraction of nature's undiscovered potential is no less important today, sitting at the intersection of engineering, maths, biology, and chemistry. 

The problem, however, comes when applying traditional engineering principles and practices to biology. Unlike the underlying principles building something more static like a bridge, nature rarely offers a consistent framework to build upon; it changes, ever evolving. Applying engineering to nature requires a shift in thinking. Synthetic biology is all about learning from nature, and adapting that to create solutions for the benefit of humanity.

In this episode of the Create the Future podcast, we speak to Kristala Prather, the Arthur D. Little Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and Principle Investigator of the Prather Research Group.

We unpack Kristala's work in biochemical engineering and synthetic biology and her route into the profession, explore why nature throws out the traditional rulebooks of engineering, and discuss ways to make STEM more accessible to future generations.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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Standing a staggering 828 metres tall, comprised of more than 4,000 tonnes of structural steel, and setting nearly a dozen world records with its construction, the Burj Khalifa is immense. Not only is it a leviathan amid Dubai’s cityscape, but it currently dwarfs every other building on the planet as well. Even during the design process, the building grew from the initial proposal by almost the height of the Eiffel Tower.

Just over a decade since it opened, the Burj Khalifa is today iconic. It has been photographed by millions of people travelling from around the world, and it also played a key role in one of the most gripping stunt acts in recent years alongside Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.

In this episode of Create the Future, we speak with the structural engineer behind the world’s tallest building: William F. Baker. We speak with Bill about his extensive career working on large scale structures and the technical challenges he’s found that come with them. We explore the relationship between architecture and engineering and the role of design in the construction process, unpack Baker’s “top five” projects to date, and hear his advice for students looking to study structural engineering in an increasingly digital age.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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Just as internet pioneer Vint Cerf is known for donning a three-piece suit, so too is this week’s guest known for their accoutrement of choice: a bow tie.

Whether you grew up in the US or not, chances are you’ve heard of Bill Nye. His titular show, Bill Nye the Science Guy, ran for five years in the mid-1990s, winning 19 of the 23 Emmys it was nominated for. Its combination of comedy and accessible educational content proved immensely popular, garnering an international audience while demonstrating that science can be for everyone. Not only did the show inspire a generation to study STEM, but its long-term success is now inspiring new generations as well.

Since the show’s conclusion in 1998, Nye has continued to promote science around the world – holding public lectures, hosting new shows, writing books, presenting podcasts, as well as doing the odd film and television cameo. So while many of us have grown up associating Nye with science, it might come as a shock to some to learn that he's also a mechanical engineer.

In this episode of Create the Future, we explore Nye’s exciting career as a scientist and engineer. We learn the origins of his iconic attire and his debut on television, discuss the impact of a career in engineering, and hear how he successfully campaigned to get sundials installed on both the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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Today’s technologies would be considered magic to people just a few decades past, but the ideas behind them are often far from new. The promise of a driverless future, for example, may seem to many like it arrived in the last decade, but it’s been both “just around the corner” and symbolic of the future for the past century.

The first driverless ground vehicle technically appeared in 1904, a radio-controlled tricycle developed by Leonardo Torres-Quevedo. In the 1920s, remote-controlled “phantom autos” drove through Ohio that could reportedly be operated from up to five miles away. The concept of a self-driving or ‘autonomous’ car then entered the mainstream in 1939, in an exhibit at New York World’s Fair that predicted America’s future in 1960.

After early prototypes debuted in the 1960s and 70s, the capability of autonomous vehicles has slowly improved alongside developments in parallel technologies. Today, the basic hardware is well established – almost all vehicles come with a combination of radar, cameras, LIDAR, GPS, and so on – and rapid advances in computing power have significantly improved the software side by making deep neural networks much more practical.

When the driverless future does become a reality, then it could cause paradigm shifts at multiple levels of society. It’s more than just a source for convenience, it could democratize transportation, reduce emissions, help to improve agricultural yield, and more.

The barrier to getting there is safety. One of the main reasons why it’s so difficult to build a commercial product is that it's no longer about just demonstrating that it works – it’s about guaranteeing that it works safely, and reliably. This isn’t even just in terms of the driving itself; the surrounding infrastructure, and potential problems with hacking and privacy breaches, are equally important factors.

So how long will it be until we get this peace of mind and, when we do, will people still retain some level of control? How do self-driving cars even work, for that matter?

In this episode, we discuss all of this and more with a “rockstar” of autonomous vehicles: Nvidia’s Justyna Zander. We explore why the driverless future has been slower to arrive than expected, the future of autonomous transport and its benefits, and the differences between a machine-based driver and a human.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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Danielle George is a Professor of Microwave Communication Engineering at the University of Manchester and the incoming President of the Institution of Engineering and technology.

Starting her career as a scientist, Danielle studied astrophysics at university. However, she quickly discovered the allure of engineering and, after choosing the more practical subjects during her studies, secured her very first job as a junior engineer working on the Planck satellite.

Today, Danielle’s research is largely dedicated to engineering the tools of scientific discovery – one of the 14 grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. She is the UK lead for amplifiers in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project and has worked with NASA and the European Space Agency to further our exploration of the Big Bang.

Danielle is just as likely to be seen in the mainstream media. She makes regular appearances on TV programmes and podcasts, raising public awareness of the global positive impact of engineering and informing the next generation of the myriad opportunities a career in STEM can offer. In 2014, she became the sixth woman to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture since its inception in 1825. She was honoured with an MBE and awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Rooke Award for the Public Promotion of Engineering in 2016, and the Michael Faraday Prize by the Royal Society in 2018.

In this episode of Create the Future, we explore Danielle’s varied career from her work on the Planck satellite through to her current projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope. We discuss the importance of science communication in the mainstream media, her reflections on International Women in Engineering Day, and what it was like to co-found the world’s first recycled robot orchestra.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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Often considered to be the world’s first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building was completed on 1 March 1885, on the corner of Adams and LaSalle Street in Chicago. At 138 feet (42m) high, it wasn’t the tallest building in Chicago at the time – but its historical significance stems not from its height, but its engineering.

Made possible by several technological breakthroughs at the time, the Home Insurance Building differed from traditional construction methods by using a structure made from iron and, more importantly, steel. This gave it a unique architecture and weight-bearing frame. Compared to previous building designs – which had reached a practical height limit to avoid their weight-bearing masonry walls getting too thick and heavy – this new design proved lighter, stronger, and a more practical way to increase height.

Though there is debate over whether the Home Insurance Building was “the first skyscraper”, or indeed the first to use a steel frame, a combination of other factors helped it to popularize the idea. It provided a template for the second and third generation skyscrapers surrounding us today; it enabled, over a century later, the myriad of unique city skylines we now see around the world.

London’s skyline, in particular, has seen immense change over the centuries. Today, you need only turn your head to see yet another iconic structure towering above you: the “Walkie-Talkie”, “Gherkin”, or “Cheesegrater” for example. But with the number of skyscrapers continuing to grow, how do we future proof them to account for people’s needs decades or centuries into the future? How do we ensure that they complement their surroundings while still encouraging innovation? On what metrics do we define a good or successful structure?

We answer these questions in this episode of Create the Future with Roma Agrawal, a structural engineer who spent six years working on one of London’s most recent and distinctive additions: the Shard. We also speak to Roma about her work promoting engineering as a career, why female representation in engineering varies so significantly around the world, and what it was like to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz alongside Emma Thompson and Rita Ora.

New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts

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