Public Lecture Series 2013: The Value of Natural Resources is to be Found in their Exploitation

Chair: Dr William Leahy
Speakers: Harris Makatsoris, Susan Jobling, Zhongyun Fan, Nigel Saunders

The extraction and exploitation of the earth’s natural resources is one of the most pressing and complex issues of our time. These resources are not limitless and the exploitation of them can have a dramatic impact upon our environment. How, therefore do we determine the “value” of these resources? And, what do we mean by their “exploitation”? Indeed, do we even understand what we mean by natural resources? These are questions this evening’s speakers will address in the context of their specific fields: water, water pollution, metals and biology. Yes, biology!

Speaker profiles 

Harris Makatsoris

Dr Charalampos (Harris) Makatsoris is a Chartered Engineer, full Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and Head of Research of the Advanced Manufacturing division at Brunel University having previously researched manufacturing at Imperial College in a range of industries.

He has a long standing expertise in Manufacturing Systems Engineering. He leads a multi-disciplinary team undertaking research in manufacturing process design, optimisation and automation with particular focus on high value materials manufacture. He is a graduate of Imperial College London and has several years of experience and a track record in industry and academia.

Harris has to date over 50 technical papers and one book in manufacturing and has been PI/Co-I in projects with a value of over £5 million since joining Brunel.

Susan Jobling

Susan was educated in Marine Zoology at Bangor University, gained a PhD in Environmental Toxicology at Brunel University and has since worked for more than 20 years for the Institute for the Environment at Brunel University, where she has been Head since August 2011. Her interests are in chemicals in water and their effects on wildlife.

Susan has many highly cited publications in peer reviewed journals. She is currently co-editor of the WHO/UNEP 2012 State of the Science report on endocrine disruption, editor and co-author of the Weybridge +14 report on endocrine disruption, and editor of the journal Chemosphere. She has served on several steering groups and advisory panels for endocrine disruption programmes, including the Swiss National Research Programme NRP50.

The Institute for the Environment was recently the recipient of a Queen's Anniversary award, a national honour, for their work on hormonally active chemicals in water.

Susan is married and has three children. 

Zhongyun Fan

Professor Fan is Professor of Metallurgy and is the Founder and current Director of BCAST (Brunel Centre for Advanced Solidification Technology) at Brunel University. He is the principal investigator/director of the EPSRC Centre – LiME, a national centre of excellence in liquid metal engineering, and is also the principal investigator/director of the EPSRC funded national programme TARF-LCV involving eight universities.

Professor Fan obtained his first degree in Metallurgy from the University of Science and Technology in Beijing and his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Surrey University. He started his academic career in 1997 at Brunel University, and prior to this he was a research fellow at Oxford University and Surrey University. He has published over 270 scientific papers.

He has been the recipient of the Elegant Work Prize (1995), the Cook/Ablett Award (2003) and the Dowding Medal and Prize (2012) from the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3), the Corac Research Award (2003) from Brunel University, and the Diploma Award (2012) from the Institute of Cast Metals Engineers (ICME).

Professor Fan is the principal inventor of a number of solidification processing technologies. He holds three international patents and six UK patents. He is a Board Member of the Light Metals Division of IOM3, a Fellow of IOM3 (FIMMM), a Fellow of ICME, Chairman of three international conferences and a member of the scientific committee of six international conferences on solidification and solidification processing. 

Nigel Saunders

Originally trained as a medical doctor, Professor Saunders pursued specialist training in medical microbiology and infection at the RPMS / Hammersmith Hospital in London. He started his full-time research career at Oxford University supported by two Wellcome Trust Fellowships, initially at the Institute for Molecular Medicine, and subsequently as group head of the Bacterial Pathogenesis and Functional Genomics Lab in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, prior to taking up the Interdisciplinary Chair of Systems Biology at Brunel in 2011. He is also an honorary senior research fellow at Somerville College, and was a lecturer at Magdalen College and a Fellow of University College, Oxford.

Part of early genome sequencing projects, Professor Saunders has had a longstanding interest in the exploitation of bacterial genome sequences to study the basis of bacterial behaviour, including what underlies the differences between bacteria which lead them to cause infections, and the types of infection that they cause. This led to a focus upon evolution and the ways in which these systems work at deeper levels, to how they evolve, and how they might subsequently be modified, and thus to ‘Systems and Synthetic Biology’.