Profile

I’m a lecturer in structural engineering at Imperial College London. Although people normally think of structural engineers as designing buildings and bridges, me and my research group use the same skills to help us understand how the bones and muscles of the human body work. Bone grows depending on the forces that it is subjected to, for example tennis players have stronger bones in the arm that they play with. We use this information to allow us to predict the structure inside bones. We are now 3D printing our predicted bone structures to see if they behave in the same way as real bone.

When I’m doing research I work with lots of different people; other engineers, including bioengineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and civil engineers, material scientists, physiotherapists, surgeons, architects. We are all interested in finding out how bones and muscles work in the human body. I might start the day by meeting my research group of PhD students and researchers, followed by either carrying out some computer analysis or an experiment in the laboratory. Both are important to help us understand what is happening. I will often then discuss the projects we are working on with other people who are interested in what we do. At the moment there is a group of architects and structural engineers who I talk to about using what we have learnt in designing and making bones to help make more efficient buildings.

Although I’m based in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering I am involved in projects going on in other Departments and research centres. For example a project on prenatal joint development in the womb, with the Department of Bioengineering, a project on lower back pain with the Department of Surgery, and projects on preventing and treating blast injuries in the military with the Royal British Legion Centre for Blast Injury Studies.

At different times in the year I also lecture on our undergraduate and MSc courses, as well as supervising individual research projects and Group Design Projects.

No day is the same as the last or the next. I like it that way.

I run a workshop for the Royal Institution of Great Britain, called “Designing the Hip Joint: Why Don’t We Fall Over When We Stand UP?” I really like working on this with groups of students from schools around London, but we can only see 60 or so students each year, and only from schools in London. I’d use the money to develop some online resources so that any teacher could lead the same workshop. It would be great to allow any school in the UK or abroad to have access to the same material, and encourage anyone interested in engineering.