How do you describe your job when you meet people at a party?
My job is to speak to people in my business (nuclear service provider and consultancy service) and find out what they know and what ideas they have. My job is to help those people to work through those ideas, to understand their value, and how to protect and ultimately exploit the value in those ideas. We solve problems for our customers. For example, Somerfield. Say they have a radioactive waste container and they come to us and say look, we want you to tell us what technologies we can use to see inside this drum. Or if an inventor comes up with an idea, I can help them figure out how to develop it, protect it, and come up with a product that can be entered into the market
What is ‘cutting-edge’ about your work?
My work is all cutting-edge because it’s about inventing stuff. By definition it’s cutting edge. I’ve invented a couple things which have been patented and used in the nuclear industry. I came up with an idea called Rad Ball which is a ball you put inside a radioactive environment and it tells you where all the radioactive material is coming from
What are the biggest implications your work will/could have in the future?
My personal work is aimed at helping the country clean up after the second World War when organizations were developing nuclear power. They created waste material, legacy waste, and the government is spending a lot of money to clean it up. There’s an environmental driver to my work. I also deal with the provision of power and energy through nuclear new-build
Describe some of the highlights of your average day.
A business trip to America, job interviews, and lots of interpersonal communication
Describe briefly how your career has progressed to date.
After my PhD I was employed as a research fellow at a company. I then got promoted to senior research technologist, then to technology manger, and finally to Intellectual Property Manager. I also worked in oil and gas for a year while I was doing my first degree as well as in the pharmaceutical industry for several weeks
How is your job cross-disciplinary?
Very!! I’ve just come out of a meeting with physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and marketing people. All those people speak different languages. The meeting was about a technology we’re developing and how to market it so people understand what it is
How well is your job compensated? What is the starting salary for your field, and how much can this be expected to rise?
A graduate working for our company makes £28K plus bonus, and we also have a final salary pension scheme which lures students in. A PhD graduate can earn £32 plus bonus. My current pay is £50K plus bonus. If you go right to the top you could probably earn £200K/year
How do you see your field developing over the next 5-10 years?
The nuclear sector is set for expansion. New nuclear-build is on the horizon. We plan to increase our numbers by 160 in the next three to four years. We’ve got 700 people at the moment, so we’re looking at a 25% increase. The nuclear industry is the only industry I can think of that promises a long term career. There’s going to be a lot of work out there, and we’ve seen a lot of graduates who are attracted to the work because they think it’s stable
What’s the most unexpected thing about your job?
It’s when we do some science or an experiment and the results come out completely unexpected. When that happens it can give you incredible insight into the way things are. We always learn more when the result is unexpected. When I was doing my PhD I got some unexpected results and it led me to a new way of interpreting information. We did some experiments and because of them we realized there was a fault in the equipment (a pharmaceutical reactor) which had to be adjusted…which ultimately improved the product (insulin)
What’s the biggest achievement of your career so far?
Two years ago I won the British Young Engineer of the year award at the House of Commons. Last year I won the ICHEME award for young engineer. Last year there was an ICHEME award for excellence and innovation in Health & Safety and I won it for my Rad Ball
