Royal Academy of Engineering

So from there, with the University of Dundee, AFBE, Equate Scotland, which you might know of, a really good organisation.

It was funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the EMBED project, which is quite a mouthful, but it stands for Engaging Minoritised Beneficiaries in Engineering Diversity Development Programme, EMBED.

And basically that was based around getting young people from high school age around Dundee from disadvantaged backgrounds into the university to expose them to engineering.

And that was a two-week programme led by 10 university students from biomedical, civil, mechanical, I think physics was also in there, students.

It's like a comfort blanket, isn't it? Saying, "Well, if we just had a bit more information, we'd, we'd be able to make a decision." But very often it makes no difference whatsoever.

Previously, she was chief executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation.

She is a non-executive director of Langer Rook, chair of Mission 44, Sir Lewis Hamilton's foundation, a member of the government's Women in Tech task force, and has been a trustee of a string of charities, including Engineering UK, the Foundation for Science and Technology, and the London Transport Museum.

It's quite a challenging time and important time for non-executives to think about how these meta trends and layers of disruption are going to impact on the organizations they're interfacing with and what that means for how and where they can add value.

I'm very happy to be here.

And just Hyetin, please.

Can we start by talking about the board roles that helped you on the path to becoming a CEO? 'Cause you spent more than two decades at the Royal Academy of Engineering before eventually becoming its CEO.

If you look back at the person who first arrived there and the person who eventually got the job, what were the experiences that did most to make you CEO ready?

My guest today is Sir John Lazar, co-founder and general partner at Enza Capital, a venture capital firm invested in technology companies across Africa.

He's also president of the Royal Academy of Engineering and chair of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK-based charity focused on helping young people learn AI and digital skills.

Sir John, welcome to the podcast.

Well, thank you very much for having me.

The whole way through my career at Metaswitch, which was where I spent most of my sort of software career, I retained a very, very strong interest in Africa and So during the period when I was working at Metaswitch, for example, I was involved with nonprofits, but working very strongly on technology rollouts in Africa, including maker labs.

And then while I was also at Metaswitch, partly to refresh myself and also to keep learning from young innovators and entrepreneurs, I got very involved in the early stage accelerator seen in London and then in Africa.

uh so initially just mentoring and then investing in funds and then doing sort of 50 angel investments all deep tech related towards the end of that period some of them pivoted back to africa and then i guess the final strand that was important is i became a fellow of the royal academy of engineering in 2011 and i've done lots of things there but the one that i've loved the most was I was a judge and a mentor on the flagship program in Africa, which is the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation.

And that gave me exposure to more than 100 early stage innovators in Africa, across sub-Saharan Africa in particular.

The new laboratories will bring together expertise in biotechnology, biocatalysis, and synthetic biology with the aim of accelerating the development and commercialization of next-generation ingredients for consumer and life sciences markets.

Julia King, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, will receive the Royal Academy of Engineering's President's Medal this week, one of the Academy's most prestigious awards.

Baroness Brown has helped to advance engineering's contribution to environmental sustainability and supported the next generation of engineers through her work in education.

PAL Aerospace's Redruth site has become the first employer in Cornwall to achieve gold status under the NextGenMakers Engineering Apprenticeship's employer accreditation.

So, for example, relatively recently, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology announced some new funding.

The Royal Society has subsequently announced some new funding, as has the Royal Academy of Engineering.

And this funding is new funding and it's targeted particularly at talented American scientists who may be looking to relocate from North America or from the USA over to the UK.

The reason for this is that there's a considerable amount of anxiety and lack of clarity on what's going to happen to science funding in the US.

So, for example, antimicrobial resistance, so how microbes evolve resistance to the drugs we use, such as antibiotics, but also quantum computing.

So quantum computing offers a significant advance in computational abilities going forwards.

So what the UK government has done is it's seen an opportunity, along with the Royal Society and the Royal Association, at the Royal Academy of Engineering, it's seen an opportunity to potentially encourage those scientists, those leading scientists in the US who are concerned about the future, an alternative opportunity to move to the UK.

The amount of money is fairly significant over the next decade or so.

Global Entrepreneur and Water Challenge Award.

And they then recommended me to the Royal Academy of Engineering, which caught wind of me.

And I then made it to the UK two years ago through a program called the Leaders in Innovation Fellowship.

And they then opened up the UK ecosystem.