Following his recent retirement, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh and former UKCRIC Deputy Convenor, Professor Gordon Masterton, joins Lord Robert Mair, chair of UKCRIC’s International Advisory Board, to reflect on his distinguished engineering career. What follows is an inspirational journey through Gordon's career highlights, rising through the ranks of industry before entering into an academic career. With such a significant contribution to engineering and to well known national infrastructure programmes, Gordon also shares some valuable insights into how the industry has changed, the importance of engineering in advancing society and addressing global challenges, and his hopes for further unlocking its potential to deal with the threat of climate change, and helping to deliver the sustainable development goals.
Robert:
So, Gordon, let me start by talking about your illustrious 35 years in industry as a civil and structural engineer, for which you were awarded an OBE for services to civil engineering in Scotland.
You've been President of many Institutions, including the Institution of Civil Engineers and director of numerous other organisations.
You've also just stepped down from being Chair of the Centre for Future Infrastructure at the University of Edinburgh. So, my question really is, are you ever going to truly retire, or are you always going to stay as active as you've currently been?
Gordon:
(Laughs) Yes, I might well ask you the same question Robert. I guess the answer depends on our definition of retirement but I'm approaching 70 rapidly, and it feels to me like the right time to be retiring at least from paid employment for the second time in my career - the first time was about eight and a half years ago. So any decisions that I make on the use of my time are my own decisions and I will be trying to split my time more evenly between family and friends, and supporting charitable organisations along with a tiny bit of consultancy from time to time. But I also want to make space for a few hobbies like sailing in the summer months. If I do end up being overworked at times, I've really only got myself to blame from now on.
That said, if there's anyone organisationally who wants a bit of help in areas where I'm able to do something constructive, like helping to encourage young people into engineering, or raising the profile of engineering, past or present, or promoting best practice in civil engineering in areas such as leading major programmes, for example, which I've been teaching at the University, or helping decision makers with policies and strategies. I would give a hearing to any approaches in those spheres, but I'll still be sailing in the summer!
Robert:
Well, that sounds great and you've seen a lot of changes over the years, I'm sure of that. So what are your reflections on the way industry has changed over the years and do you think you're able to communicate that to your university students at Edinburgh?
Gordon:
I certainly try to with the benefit of having a long career, more like 40 years in practice, but I think that fundamentally the procedures that we adopt for engineering infrastructure haven't changed that much when you drill down to the basic principles. I remember writing the Foreword for the eighth edition of Civil Engineering Procedure, which came out in 2020 and yes, that edition is more complicated than the first edition, written in 1963, which I still have from my University times…
Robert:
I remember it!
Gordon:
…and it's more complicated because we've got a wider variety of procurement and contractual strategies available to us, and it describes some modern enabling tools like BIM (Building Information Modelling) and data analytics that we now have available to us that we didn't have in the 1960s and 1970s. But the principles are still very similar and I suppose that shouldn't really be a surprise because civil engineers have designed mega projects since the canal and the railway systems transformed countries on a large and significant scale. Those were mega programmes if you take them all together. And you can easily make a case for the Ancient Egyptians and Romans being pioneers of mega projects.
In teaching one of the modules that I prepared for the MSc in Leading Major Programmes I use the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal as case studies because I found that many of the key lessons from studying those are readily transferable to strategic risk management principles today. Basically, the lessons learned were just as applicable at the macro scale as they are for much more recent mega projects.
What I think has definitely changed in the course of my career has been the realisation now of the urgency attached to the need for a response to the reality of climate change. It simply wasn't being talked about in any university teaching in the 1970s, although sustainability and alternative technology was. We had seminal books like “Silent Spring” or “Limits to Growth” which really led the debates on alternative technologies and concerns about future resource shortages.
Robert:
They were less about global warming, weren’t they?
Gordon:
That's right. The initial drivers of these concerns were the widespread use of DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) in agriculture or concerns about longer term global resource shortages from the Limits to Growth modelling. The need for change wasn’t prompted by climate change. The evidence for that emerged sometime later.
Robert:
I remember, Rachel Carson wasn’t it, who wrote “Silent Spring”. It was very influential. It was more about biodiversity wasn’t it, principally?
Gordon:
It was, climate change started to be talked about in the mid-1980s or so, but it took quite a long, slow build-up, sadly, of the momentum of received wisdom from the emerging evidence, before it became widely accepted.
Robert:
Yes, and then “Limits to Growth” came, from MIT I think, didn't it?
Gordon:
Yes, Meadows and Meadows.
Robert:
That was fairly thought-provoking because for civil engineers who would have grown up with the whole concept of growth being about expansion and more and more infrastructure, and all of the things that seemed the right thing to be doing, was being questioned for the first time.
Gordon:
And they were attempting to model things that hadn't been really modelled before, identifying peak oil for example. Back then they didn't get it quite right; of course they didn't - forecasting never does. But it really did grab our attention and got the debate going.
Robert:
Looking back over your long career Gordon, tell us a bit more about how it all started after you graduated.
Gordon:
I suppose it started even before graduating. Of course, the decision to study civil engineering was a big decision, you know, for a school attendee at that time. I was the first in my family to go to university so I had a pretty solid view that education should lead to an interesting and rewarding career and not just be an end in itself. I lived not far from the Forth Road Bridge and watched it being built when I was a youngster. It opened in 1964. That was an amazing experience. Seeing this massive structure visible from my bedroom window and then being driven across it as a passenger in a car at the age of 10, really left a strong impression on me. I didn't really know it had been designed by civil engineers at that time but when I got around to looking at University entrance I made sure to ask careers teachers, “what should I be studying to be able to design these big bridges like the Forth Road Bridge”?
Of course they told me, but they also told me that I should really study physics and maths because I was good at those and I could possibly even be a teacher when I graduated. Despite that advice, I chose civil engineering and studied it at the University of Edinburgh and I really loved it.
After graduation I joined the consulting engineering company Babtie, Shaw and Morton, as it was called back then and I ended up working in the same company until I retired. It had changed its name twice in that time but it was still the same company I joined. I never expected to be there that long when I arrived as a raw graduate but they kept promoting me, I suppose, till I was pretty much locked in as a director and shareholder at the age of 36.
Robert:
And what were the first kinds of projects you worked on as a young engineer?
Gordon:
Well, I was always interested in structures as I had specialised in structures in my final year - structural dynamics, theory of structures etc, so I was allocated to one of the structures teams. A lot of it was marine related, ports and harbours were quite a speciality, and bridges were a separate department at that time so I designed projects like coastal defence work or building foundations, and learning the basics of how to convert theory into practice. Then to incorporate it into a series of contract documents and drawings. Hand drawn of course, no AutoCAD at that time!
I took the examination to become a Chartered Structural Engineer as well as a Chartered Civil Engineer and then I was given the opportunity to design bridges, particularly after I came back from a year doing an MSc at Imperial College London in concrete structures. Not long after that I became head of the bridges team and whilst I never designed one on the scale of the Forth Bridge, I led teams on quite a number of smaller scale bridges on the Trunk Road and Motorway network. I can still take my grandchildren on road trips and bore them about the bridges that granddad had designed.
Robert:
A lot of them in Scotland?
Gordon:
Quite a lot, but not all by any means, because by then Babtie had become much more of a UK business and we were expanding with the number of offices growing in England. So I’ve designed bridges in Devon and Cornwall and in the north of England – but, yes, quite a lot in Scotland!
Robert:
Then, after you became a Director of Babtie you were doing a lot more of other kinds of infrastructure weren't you? I remember you were very involved in the Crossrail development, now the Elizabeth Line, and indeed HS2, where you were working on behalf of the Department for Transport. Is that right?
Gordon:
Yes, that's right. In fact, that was probably in the period after Jacobs had acquired Babtie in 2004 and I was made a Vice President of Jacobs,. in the last 10 years before my retirement, which included bidding and winning the Government ‘P-Rep’, the project representative, role on Crossrail. This was an oversight and assurance role rather than hands-on delivery or responsibility for the programme management. I led a very small team from 2009 to 2012. The HS2 role came after retirement, chairing an independent procurement assurance panel for the ICE, providing an Independent Peer Review of the HS2 procurement packages. That role is still active so I can't really talk about HS2 too much except I will say that I have gone public in saying that it wasn't a good day for evidence-based decision making when the Government cancelled phase 2A to Crewe. A decision like that really deserves to have just as much scrutiny by Parliament as it had when the scheme was approved and given Royal Assent. To me, to have cancelled it without scrutiny and reasoned, transparent arguments, seems grossly asymmetric. There may be a lesson there for the future. Maybe we should structure the wording of Hybrid Bills for major projects to include a commitment for its delivery; just as we have made a commitment in the Climate Change Act to deliver the targets that are set out.
In the early years of Crossrail I suppose the key challenges were convincing the Government and any external auditors, like the Major Projects Authority at that time, that the independent oversight that we were providing was respected as a view. We were commended for that in various National Audit Office reviews carried out. Another challenge was giving robust, independent warnings if key indicators, such as the rate of spending project contingency were trending in the wrong direction. And we did so, even back in 2012.
Robert:
Yes, with the Elizabeth Line (formerly Crossrail), when I meet people who possibly don’t know a lot about what civil engineers do, if they either live in, or near London, or have been to London, I often ask, “Have you been on the Elizabeth Line” and they all say, “it’s wonderful, is that what civil engineers do?”.
Gordon:
(smiles) Absolutely and my first opportunity to use it was a week after it opened, and to take the trip from Tottenham Court Road to Paddington and back was absolutely terrific. I think Crossrail is a huge success story and the final outturn cost still gives a very handsome benefit/cost ratio when you consider the wider economic benefits, which even back in 2009, were calculated at £42 billion. So even if the early estimate from 2007 or 2008, before it went through the Hybrid Bill process, had crept up by a few £billion, as it indeed turned out, it was still hugely beneficial. It was of course a surprise to everyone when the need for more time and more money was announced very late in the day, and the way that was handled in 2019 was a big disappointment to me, looking in from the outside by then. The same approach should have been taken as in the 2012 London Olympics which progressively increased its estimate to complete, and finally delivered the programme within the most recent estimate. So everyone was happy.
Robert:
I find that it’s one of the projects that I'm most proud of. I have been involved with Crossrail, which was what it was called before the Elizabeth Line, from the early 90s right through to completion. It had a difficult start when there was a bill in Parliament which stopped and restarted it but it's a fabulous project, and I'm very proud of having been involved in a small way. What's the project you've been most proud of would you say?
Gordon:
Well, that would be right up there as well Robert, although oversight and assurance is a bit less proactive than being directly responsible. So, I'd have to couple Crossrail with those that I was fully responsible as a project engineer for the design, especially for projects that made a difference to local communities.
Robert:
Which ones spring to mind?
Gordon:
The first one that I was allowed to have my head on was the widening and strengthening of an old bridge in the centre of Dumfries, the Buccleuch Street bridge. It was a bottleneck for traffic because left turns from the approaches couldn't be made without encroaching on the traffic coming in the opposite direction. Traffic didn't flow freely and there was also a realisation that it was an old bridge and there might be things inside when we opened them up that were not as well looked after as we'd hoped. Sure enough that was the case, so it became a strengthening project as well. At the end of the project we were commended and it won an award for the sympathetic treatment of a heritage structure incorporating modern features that met modern standards of containment and alignment but nevertheless still looked like the bridge that we'd significantly altered. The spirit of that bridge was preserved. That then got me interested in conservation engineering projects and sympathetic approaches to refurbishment. I suppose it sowed the seed of later becoming Chair of the Panel for Historical Engineering Works of the Civils, which I still enjoy doing.
Robert:
I know you've done a wonderful job in that role and that is so interesting for all of us, for experienced engineers and very young engineers as well, to look back on the amazing engineering achievements of our forebears. Your chairmanship of that must have been very rewarding for you.
Gordon:
Absolutely. And that's also a learning process because the more I read about Telford and Stephenson and John Rennie and others, the more I realised that actually, what they did in their time with the skills and the tools available to them was prodigious. Big projects like the Caledonian Canal would be phenomenal challenges today. They didn't always go according to their initial plan but they also recognised and dealt with risk, just as we should be recognising it as something that we have to deal with today, because we know that we won't be able to predict everything in advance, that there will be situations that change due to external circumstances, or even things that we just don't know enough about before we start. So the way that the engineers of that era dealt with risk is also enlightening and that knowledge should be carried forward as an essential part of preparing for new projects. I never saw history as arid territory and I never studied it just for the sake of it. It was teasing out the lessons learned that I was interested in.
Robert:
And you founded the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame. In fact, you're the current chairman which is fantastic because you're celebrating the careers of great engineers. Do you think we should do more of that? Is it something that the general public should get more exposure to?
Gordon:
Yes, absolutely. My reasoning was that if we have sports halls of fame and music halls of fame, why not an engineering hall of fame? I got my first chance to test that as President of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland. Hence the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame. For one night, every year at least, at the James Watt Dinner we announced new inductees and we shamelessly blow our own trumpet about engineers and engineering, and that's something that engineers are notoriously loath to do. Other professions are much better at self-promotion. Engineers are famously self-effacing and modest - which is commendable as a character trait, but it doesn't get you noticed as a profession and if you're not noticed then there's a risk of being marginalised. So, the life stories of these inductees are intended, at least, to be inspiring role models to young people particularly, but also to the general public to better appreciate and understand their amazing achievements.
Robert:
How many inductees have you got now?
Gordon:
We started in 2011 and now we've got 56 inductees. We do about three or four each year. When I first started I thought well, we might have enough for 10 years and stop then. But there's such a long list of unsung heroes and heroines that deserve to be better known that it may just keep going indefinitely.
Robert:
Not so long ago I came across some wonderful Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, of all of the engineering programmes done in countries like India, in the days of the Empire, most of which were Scottish engineers. It's very interesting that the real pioneers, the engineers that really went out and designed and built things all around the world were very often Scottish.
Gordon:
That's absolutely right and it may have something to do with the weather up here, but also to do with the strength of the educational building blocks. The place where Robert Stephenson was sent by his father when he was in his early formative years, was Edinburgh University. It was teaching practical subjects like applied mathematics and natural philosophy and chemistry, and geology taught by Joseph Black, John Robison and others. These courses were the foundations of engineering, before engineering was available anywhere as a course of study, which didn't come until the 1840s and 1850s.
Robert:
Yes, and I think I remember reading somewhere that the very distinguished William Rankine was also instrumental in helping Japan get into the modern world of engineering.
Gordon:
Well that's right and Rankine, an alumnus of Edinburgh University, famously became the second chair of Civil engineering and Mechanics at Glasgow University, the first being Lewis Gordon, another alumnus of Edinburgh University. Rankine was asked by the Japanese authorities to recommend a candidate for becoming the new principal of the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo, when Japan was easing its restrictions on foreigners coming into the country in the Meiji era. This was one of the early steps it was taking out of its closed society and was keen to learn engineering from the best teachers and Rankine immediately recommended Henry Dyer, who was still in his twenties, indeed he had just graduated. Henry Dyer travelled over to Japan, wrote the curriculum for the first year on his voyage there and he was a huge success in Tokyo, and is revered there.
Robert:
All based on the Edinburgh and Glasgow relationship?
Gordon:
Yes, that Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities combined well in the exchange of people and knowledge at that time. Robison started in Glasgow then moved to Edinburgh. James Black started in Glasgow and moved to Edinburgh, producing outstanding students like Robert Stevenson (the lighthouse Stevenson), Robert Stephenson, John Rennie, William Rankine. Black and Robison also had regular communication with their friend James Watt throughout his career. Glasgow and Edinburgh provided a really strong axis of education in the practical subjects and that carried forward for quite some time through William Rankine, Lord Kelvin, James Thomson, James Tait, James Clerk Maxwell - the “Lions of the North”.
Robert:
Taking us back to the present day, when you took up your tenure at University of Edinburgh as Chair of Future infrastructure, what sort of things were you introducing there that would have been different from what they had previously been teaching? Obviously, you brought with you 30 plus years of experience in industry which must have been invaluable. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
Gordon:
The Chair title really appealed to me and when I arrived the opportunities for more interdisciplinary collaboration seemed really important to me and so a lot of my time was spent as the engineering representative on the early formation of the Edinburgh Futures Institute. It’s a new space for multidisciplinary teaching and research and it's about to open fully. The project was somewhat delayed by COVID-19 but it will be an amazing space when it's fully open and it's fully populated. It’s housed in the refurbished Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. It's a very large old Victorian building with six wings and a huge and central spire. Not the ideal space that you would necessarily choose for a multidisciplinary collaborative, sand pitting group, but the architectural team has overcome the isolation ward layout really well. Within the Edinburgh Futures Institute will be the Centre for Future Infrastructure under Professor Sean Smith.
Other time was spent developing new courses for the Leading Major Programmes MSc which again, is a multi-disciplinary collaboration with multiple schools contributing: engineering, Business School, informatics and even philosophy. It was very pleasing to be able to contribute to that and see it established. We graduated our first cohort of students just a couple of weeks ago with their new MScs. And of course while in that role, being introduced to UKCRIC and what UKCRIC had already achieved when I arrived at Edinburgh through the funding that had been successfully negotiated in the first tranche, I thought was terrific. Collaboration is the future, there's no question about it. We can have much more of an influence working together than competing, so becoming Deputy Convenor of UKCRIC was a big thing for me as well.
I also really enjoyed supervising students on their MEng projects and their final year. I also did a little bit of teaching on professionalism and ethics. I co- supervised a few PhD students. There was a student society, “Hyped” that had done so well with the Hyperloop Challenge it took 2 pods across to the SpaceX headquarters to test them on the tube that Elon Musk had provided. A group of them subsequently created a new business called Continuum Industries, which is doing extremely well. It’s changed its selling point as providing essential tools not just for Hyperloop projects, but any linear infrastructure and it has sophisticated tools for helping the early stages of planning for that. That’s been really exciting to see.
Robert:
You mentioned UKCRIC which has been, as you know, a wonderful initiative in terms of the exchange of knowledge between academia, research and policy, and the inextricably important linkage between those three groupings. Do you think that more could be done in that area? You look at some other countries, for example France, Germany, where you see very intricate and very long-standing relationships between government, academia and industry. Do you think that we have enough of that in the UK? There's a lot more, I think, that we could be doing and UKCRIC could be doing but there are some barriers facing us on that. Could you say a bit more about what you think these are?
Gordon:
Well academia should be much closer to policy makers than it is in the UK, typically. I hope there's an opportunity after COVID-19 and the experience there of the country facing a national emergency. Scientific advice was seen as central to the solutions, although it was quite revealing and a bit disappointing to me that the current inquiry is exposing the shallowness of understanding by politicians of the science-based advice being provided. I think UKCRIC is a fantastic concept that really, really should succeed. It thoroughly deserves to get the continuity funding to demonstrate its potential beyond the first stage of purely investing in buildings. And we need it not just because it has the potential to foster greater collaboration across academia but also between academia and industry, and across the whole of the UK. We've got a very long way to go in the UK to really be able to claim that industry and academia have a good working partnership in the field of infrastructure. It’s partly to do with the very low margins that industry has in both contracting and consulting and so we've got a long way to go in that because, by and large, for most industry organisations academic collaboration just doesn't feature for them. There are honourable exceptions of course but if we are to break down those barriers for the bulk of the construction and the infrastructure delivery and infrastructure management players in industry, then it really needs a nationally distributed academic resource that works at building bridges between a highly fragmented industry. Academics are sometimes too focused on competition rather than collaboration simply because the system encourages that all the time with relatively small drip feeding of research opportunities and relatively small short-term packages rather than strategic long-term commitments. UKCRIC was a substantial investment by government. It was an exception to the general rule and I could see the power of that concept which is why I was happy to be involved, but it needs government and the funding councils to see that potential too, and to correspondingly invest in it. It may well do yet and I hope that it does - primarily for the next generation of researchers.
Robert:
And do you think there are other countries that we in the UK should be looking to for inspiration in terms of making UKCRIC even more of a success?
Gordon:
I think that there are always pockets of excellence. I look at Australia and from what I can see, what I’ve heard and know about it, and the way that they've recently grappled with the issues of systems-based infrastructure challenges. But in terms of converting research into successful and flourishing new businesses, etc., I suppose still, the US is the prime leader in that, not so much in infrastructure, but in other areas of course, having fostered the outstandingly successful new tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and many, many more. The US enjoys the benefit of scale with its economy and success breeds success. So with that series of amazing successes in spawning some of the biggest companies in the world in the tech field, many of which were launched in our lifetimes Robert, there is an infrastructure, if you like, of support for converting research into successful business which is really strong in the US. Too often too many of the UK start-ups are now intersected by American conglomerates which have been through that route already and are now mature, and well-funded. Even European corporates are buying the talent in the UK rather cheaply at the emerging stages because they take the long view and see their potential. I've seen examples of that as a judge of the MacRobert Award for Engineering. If anything, and sadly, I think that we're lagging even further behind over the last decade or so. Brexit hasn't helped and nor has the credibility of government decision making. When you have as many leadership changes in the country as we have had, then we can only be seen as flaky and unreliable and not really worth investing in. Young start-up companies have to operate in the prevailing political landscape, but if that's flaky, unreliable and unpredictable, that makes it really difficult to attract external investors.
Robert:
You mentioned the high-tech industries, not necessarily within our sector, but obviously there have been huge changes . Do you think that’s probably what's been the most significant change to engineering in your lifetime and in your professional career as well?
Gordon:
Absolutely, I think so. There haven't been many changes in the kind of materials that we use like concrete and steel, not yet anyway. Maybe new, greener nature-based solutions will come, probably as a result of relearning from the period before we conveniently changed to higher emission materials like concrete and steel. But the biggest changes by far have been in the communication systems that we can operate now. The speed of data acquisition, the ability to wrangle large volumes of data that are being acquired from our infrastructure facilities. On Crossrail again, the instrumentation on the rolling stock wheel interface is phenomenal and allows regular updates of maintenance models because it has gathered really high-quality information on the rate of degradation so that maintenance can be timed optimally, rather than reactively with broken-down trains stuck in tunnels. So there have been really smart developments in these areas in the last 20 years.
Robert:
How does that make you think about the future? What do you think are the really exciting innovations in infrastructure?
Gordon:
Well, when I took on the job as Chair of Future infrastructure, I said I will never attempt to forecast the future. It's really hard to make predictions, so I won't. Even quite recent predictions I've seen in the last eight years in academia look rather silly now. So what I hope, I suppose, rather than predict, is that infrastructure and cities are truly accepted as one of a relatively small group of research rich areas that nations are investing in, because they recognise the multiple benefits., to the existential threat of climate change. Whether that’s in getting to net zero greenhouse gas emissions, or dealing with the inevitability of climate change and the need for adaptation which is already with us. Even if we become net zero tomorrow, the change won't be reversed overnight. Adaptation is already an imperative.
We've got significantly under-resourced national infrastructure at the moment in the face of climate change. That needs to change. And it is only a system of systems approach that will address this properly, which will require really strong, diverse research teams - and hence the UKCRIC model of a dispersed national infrastructure institute, collaborating and cross fertilising with industry and other academics. That's still my hope. That the benefits of that model are recognised by forward-thinking funding agencies as critical for the long-term programme of dealing with the existential threat of climate change and helping to deliver the sustainable development goals (SDGs). All 17 of them depend on infrastructure in some way. We're only going to successfully deliver the SDGs if we really understand the key role of infrastructure in cities and devise better designs for people, informed by large scale research. That won’t happen without greatly increasing infrastructure research resources to seed and to feed the downstream changes required; and I hope governments, not just our government but all governments, finally get this consistently and treat climate change transformation as an enduring programme, not subject to cancellation on a political whim. As engineers we are driven by a desire to be improvers. I think that's actually our fundamental motivation. The reason I became as an engineer was the attraction of being able to improve things and make changes for the better and so I always have, and I always will be looking forward optimistically to a better world!
Robert:
That's great. Gordon, that's been really terrific hearing about your past experience and your thoughts about the future, and of course the huge potential for UKCRIC, which you've been very instrumental in doing a lot to advance, so thank you very much.
Biographies
Professor Emeritus Gordon Masterton FREng, FRSE, FICE, FIStructE, FIES, MCIWEM
Professor Masterton was Vice-President of Jacobs Engineering until 2015 and later that year became Chair of Future Infrastructure at the University of Edinburgh. He is a past president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, past president of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland, past Master of the Worshipful Company of Engineers, former chairman of the Construction Industry Council, former Vice Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, and founder and current Chairman of the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame. His time in industry included the role of UK Government’s Project Representative for Crossrail from 2009-13 and he has served and then chaired the ICE’s Independent Assurance Panel for major programmes including HS2 and National Highways. At the University of Edinburgh, he was instrumental in establishing the Centre for Future Infrastructure and the MSc in Leading Major Programmes. . In 2021 he was joint lead with Sir Doug Oakervee for the Technical Feasibility of a Fixed Link between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as part of Lord Peter Hendy’s Union Connectivity Review.
Professor Lord Robert Mair CBE FREng FICE FRS NAE
Lord Robert Mair is the Founding Head of the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) at Cambridge University and Emeritus Professor of Civil Engineering. After working in industry for 27 years, in 1998 he was appointed Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Cambridge and Head of Civil Engineering. He was Master of Jesus College 2001-11. He is one of the founding Directors of the Geotechnical Consulting Group (GCG), an international consulting company based in London, and has extensive experience of design and construction for a wide variety of civil engineering projects in many countries, particularly those involving geotechnical issues and underground construction.
He was President of the Institution of Civil Engineers 2017-18 and until recently Chairman of the Department of Transport’s Science Advisory Council. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Engineering. He was appointed an independent crossbencher in the House of Lords in 2015, and until recently was a member of its Select Committee on Science and Technology and its Select Committee on Risk Assessment and Risk Planning.