Prized profession

The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize) celebrates the achievements of the world’s most influential engineers, while attempting to raise the public profile of engineering and inspire students.

Manchester University’s famous physics professor and QEPrize 2015 judge Brian Cox said that one of the reasons the prize was founded was to “make clear the contribution of engineering to everybody’s lives”.

It does this, not least of all, by attaching £1 million worth of prize money to the award.

But does the QEPrize really benefit the engineering community?

“The £1 million award is designed to be aspirational, and to give an indication to the outside world the value that is placed on great engineering,” says Jonathan Narbett, head of operations, QEPrize.

“I didn’t know for a long time what I wanted to do. I just always knew I wanted to do something that could help people

2015 QEPrize winner Robert Langer

Narbett says the QEPrize fills a much-needed gap in the engineering awards field, while recognising excellence in engineering.

“We give the prize not to areas of potential, or to engineers who may be great in the future but engineers who have already done something that has demonstrably changed, in this case, millions of lives,” said Cox speaking at last month’s award ceremony.

This year’s winner of the QEPrize Robert Langer, a chemical engineer and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, won the award largely for his work on polymer-based large molecular weight drug delivery technology.

Langer will be presented with his award by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace this October.

“Robert Langer took the guesswork out of designing controlled drug delivery systems, using his profound knowledge of chemical engineering, chemistry, biology and polymer science,” said QEPrize 2015 judge Lynn Gladden, Shell professor of chemical engineering at the University of Cambridge.

“There was originally great doubt that a polymer delivery system would be able to deliver the macromolecules required for various medical treatments, but he challenged that thinking and produced a methodology that is now the foundation of much of today’s drug delivery technology,” she said.

His contribution to medical science, which includes both the development of drugs to treat prostate cancer and the engineering of artificial skin, has reportedly affected the lives of more than 2 billion people.

QEPrize award winners are chosen, in part, to provide real role models for the next generation of engineers.

Langer certainly fits the bill.

However, Langer’s advice to students is not perhaps what you would expect. It terms of choosing a career path, Langer suggests that students, particularly science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) students, should always “follow their hearts”.

“Different people may feel a passion for different things and that’s OK, that’s even good,” Langer says.

“But I feel you should always follow your heart and do the things you gravitate towards and that give you the most satisfaction.”

As can sometimes be the case, however, students are unsure, or unaware, what their passion really is. As a student, Langer was no different.

“I didn’t know for a long time what I wanted to do,” he says.

“I just always knew I wanted to do something that could help people. Fortunately, when I was a post-doctoral researcher I ended up working in a surgery department at a hospital and that changed my life. I got to see all kind of medical problems that I thought I could apply my chemical engineering skills to.”

For Langer, the award is recognition for an important field of engineering that has both helped saved lives and inspired people.

However, for Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) director of engineering Colin Brown, £1 million is still a good way of “grabbing the headlines”.

“I think the fact that £1 million is associated with this prize means that it must be important, it adds gravitas to it,” Brown says.

Though Brown is under no illusion as to the importance of Langer’s work, he suggests the award is naturally skewed to sectors such as IT or biomedicine, as opposed to disciplines like mechanical engineering.

The inaugural prize was awarded in 2013 to those engineers responsible for creating the internet, for example.

“IT and biomedicine are sectors where there is a more obvious ability to innovate quickly and it is more noticeable to the general public,” he says.

“That doesn’t mean the QEPrize is not a brilliant award. It’s a good communication tool, particularly to young people.”

Brown says that aside from the possibility of winning awards and prize money, far more must be done to make engineering, and its real-world benefits, appeal to young people.

He also argues against Langer’s advice of simply following your passion as being the right approach.

“Students need to be informed,” Brown says.

“Following their passion is important but there are a greater proportion of teenagers who want to be actors than who want to be engineers.”

To challenge this, Brown points to the IMechE’s Five Tribes: Personalising Engineering Education report as a useful guide for inspiring students and sparking their interest in engineering.

The report says that adolescents aged between 11 and 19 can be divided broadly into five categories determined by their values and their reactions to engineering as a subject and potential career.

It outlines five recommendations designed to boost participation in engineering and engineering-related subjects through more diverse and more modern approaches (see box attached in PDFs).

“Science and engineering should be seen as an education, not as a vocation,” Brown says.

“What we tend to tell kids is [that] if you study science you become a science teacher and if you go to university to study engineering you become an engineer. I think we have to work a lot harder to say that as an education, and approach to life, the doors remain open.”