Spotlight on Professor Nigel Titchener-Hooker

This week the spotlight is on Professor Nigel Titchener-Hooker, Dean of UCL Engineering.

What is your role and what does it involve?

I've not long started my new role as Dean of UCL Engineering, so my response is possibly not well-formed. The faculty is a powerhouse of education, teaching, research and engagement. My role is to help the nine departments to realise yet greater levels of achievement and to ensure our students regard this as simply the best choice they ever made and that employers beat their way to our door for our graduates.

How long have you been at UCL and what was your previous role?

I started my career at UCL as a PhD student, working in the rapidly expanding biochemical engineering group of a joint chemical engineering and biochemical engineering department. I was exceptionally lucky; my supervisors were the late Peter Dunmill and Mike Hoare, who was to become the first Head of Department of the fledgling Department of Biochemical Engineering. That was 1983-86. 

After a brief period with Glaxo Group Research at Greenford, I came back to UCL to help set up new research on the design of whole bioprocesses, using the pioneering facilities we had to verify predictions and to improve the accuracy of our models. Over the years I've helped to grow that capability and to push our training and research agendas.

For the past five years I've enjoyed being Head of Department - it's a most wonderful department, full of dynamic and energetic individuals with a real passion to achieve change on a global scale. The team works closely across all aspects from the earliest points of contact, guided by an impressive Professional Services team through to academics who supervise and teach and are supported by a world class technical team to deliver arguably the best graduates anywhere in the field.

What working achievement or initiative are you most proud of?

There have been many fantastic achievements, but I think those are all summated in the winning of the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in 2013. Awarded to the department for its significant impact on global healthcare through the creation of processes for the manufacture of many key biological drugs, including Gardasil for vaccination against cervical cancer, it marks out the department as the international lead in the discipline.

Tell us about a project you are working on now which is top of your to-do list?

Biochemical engineering has a second-to-none track record of strategic research in partnership with industry. We have secured a series of large, multi-disciplinary research centres through EPSRC and with colleagues across UCL and in other top research departments. Currently I'm helping to plan a manufacturing hub to examine how we will realise the potential for the delivery of biological therapies targeted to increasingly smaller populations all the way down to the treatment of individuals via so-called personalised medicines.

What is your favourite album, film and novel?

That's a difficult one! For the novel I love the simplicity and power of The Old Man and the Sea. The narrative is wonderfully evocative and the interplay between the fisherman and his prized catch is so compelling. I'm rather a sentimental person when it comes to films, and maybe one of the BBC films of a Hardy novel would be my favourite for the gorgeous scenery and the observations of human relationships set in a land at a time of immense change, on the cusp of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. For listening I adore Keane, but as those who hear me around the office can attest, I'm often whistling an operatic aria.

Who would be your dream dinner guests?

That's exceptionally hard. I've worked with some fascinating individuals and maybe I'd simply relish time with them. Somehow we have so little time these days to get to know our colleagues better. I'd like that!

What advice would you give your younger self?

Simply embrace opportunities!

What would it surprise people to know about you?

Perhaps that my passion at school was for English! That's probably a good skill for an engineer, since communicating is so very important.

What is your favourite place?

I'm going to choose the island of St Miguel in the Azores. I went there first for a NATO-sponsored conference. It's truly magical and a firm favourite place for my family, in whose company almost anywhere is a good place to be!