Meet the Team: David Howard

I started working on the project six years ago. Previously, I had worked for the Francis Crick Institute, setting up their new facility, and when I saw this, working on a project on neurological conditions and dementia - it was something that I really wanted to do.

One thing that I found really interesting was the opportunity to be involved at a very early stage, working on floor designs and interacting with everyone involved in the project.

I am programme manager and my role is to make sure the building will work for the people who will be based here and to tailor the way people work to take full advantage of our cutting-edge, 21st century scientific building.

I feed into how the construction works, what will be in the building, how it's designed and how everything will work. At the end of the process I am responsible for moving everyone in and supporting them so scientific activities can start as soon as possible.

We have established a core project team who have developed new ways of working for the building with a number of key initiatives that have been put in place over the last five years and will continue.

The project team itself is a really small dedicated group who put in such a lot of effort to make it work and are all experts in the different things that they do. Without having that core team underneath delivering this, it would have been a lot harder to get anything done.

Our core technology platforms are fundamental to this – where cutting-edge equipment and services in the building are shared so that a wider community of scientists can have access to them.

When I came on board, the vision was well established that we wanted to collaborate more effectively and work in a different way, as well as have a number of shared core technology platforms

At the beginning, we took all the things that we wanted to do in the building and broke them down into component parts. We then built them up into a number of initiatives, which will all deliver four or five things.

If we could deliver these early and do things that weren't just related to the new building, we would do so. For example, our chemical management initiative is already up and running in Queens Square. When the new building is ready, all of those practises and ways of working will be transferred over there.

When I worked on setting up the Crick, the idea that drove it was collaboration and  breaking down barriers to allow that to happen. That's a fundamental principle of what we're trying to do here. We’re looking at how to collaborate effectively within this new building but also across the dual hub and across UCL.

If our initiatives work for the new building, we can look at how they can work for all of IoN, and then across the wider UCL community, so that we're not working in silos, but sharing best practice and learning from each other. The Crick was seen as having some of the best practice approaches to scientific labs in the world, so we took a lot of the principles that were applied there and tested them to see if they would work at IoN. If they worked, we adopted them and if they didn't, we had to think about what else could work in their place.

The biggest challenge has been the external world and everything that's happened in the last five years, from the pandemic to Brexit to inflation and numerous wars across the world. All of that affects the programme. From our supply chain - getting concrete into the building, getting trained staff in construction, recruiting people to work in the building long term, all of that has a massive impact.  We've done a good job to minimise the delays and costs despite it all.

The thing I've enjoyed the most has always been the collaboration with other people and the fact that everyone involved in the project really wants it to succeed. From the construction team who are incredibly proud of delivering the bricks and mortar, to the fundraising team, to everybody who will be working in the building. Everyone wants to find a way to make it work and if a problem crops up, they look at a way of resolving it.

Working with IoN leadership has been fantastic – people like Mike Hanna, Gipi Schiavo, Hélène Crutzen and Selina Wray among many others. Having the support of Alan Thompson, the Programme Sponsor, to navigate some of the issues that have arisen has also been invaluable.

I’ve also really enjoyed engaging with the art programme. It’s a bit out of my comfort zone, but finding that link between how art represents what's happening in the building and the history of the site is something that I find fascinating. It will adds a dimension to the building that will make the spaces much more interesting.

I love the openness of the building. I like the idea that lab floors are open spaces for everybody to collaborate, but also that the ground floor is open to the public, with a café and the sides of the building clearly visible to the public. It will allow the new building to be part of the community as opposed to being an isolated academic institute, where people don't know what's going on inside.