Where academia meets the games industry, things are afoot. Dr Mike Samuel, Lecturer in Digital Film and Television and Co-Director of the Bristol Digital Game Lab, explains how gaming can be a vehicle for public good – and recalls the role of the Atari 2600 in his own upbringing. 

The Bristol Digital Game Lab is a focal point for conversations between academia and industry about video games and culture – responding to a need, especially among our student body, for someone to broker those kinds of connections.  

In the last year, we’ve held lots of conversations with industry (including with the lead writers behind 2023’s Game of the Year Award-winning Baldur’s Gate 3), as well as ‘game jams’ where we bring people together to discuss and even create games with industry professionals and external parties. For example, we ran a successful game jam with Dr Edward King exploring the potential for games to respond creatively to the theme of algorithmic bias. Most conversations feed into further research; others result in working prototypes. We never know on the day – that’s one of the great things about it.  

We’re in an era of convergence, both in academia and in technology. It’s an exciting time to work in the intersection of different fields and consider the possibilities.   

Let the games begin 

My academic life began in film and television studies, but I’ve always loved and valued games. My Nan first introduced me to gaming when I was very young. She was a keen gamer, so on weekends we’d bond over the Atari 2600. Luckily, the rest of my family embraced games as well: for my sisters, it was The Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon, and for my father, Vigilante8 and Grand Theft Auto. 

I was the first generation in my family to go to university: I was born into the fallout of Thatcher, in a South Wales post-mining town. We didn’t have much money, but my parents made time for art and for movies, and for talking about them as well. I guess that was their way of enabling us to escape our surroundings and to take pleasure in images and stories. On reflection, it was very much a humanities upbringing. 

That pleasure in talking about things has stayed with me. Some of our coders who come to our sessions are quite product-oriented: their end goal is to create a prototype – and that’s fantastic. But for me, the exciting product is the conversation itself, spending time with people and thinking through some of those bigger questions through the optic of games. It’s also beautiful to see some of those ideas articulated, whether or not they result in a new game.  

Birth of a notion 

Actually, we have started to create a game ourselves, about postnatal depression (PND). This has really been my baby (aside from my other babies, human or otherwise). It came out of a frustration: after I became a new father three years ago, I personally experienced depression. What little information and resources I did find were the traditional pamphlets with condescending language and mindfulness imagery – the sort of thing I’ve always been allergic to. So, I started out by asking myself: how would I like to find this information? I also had a wider interest in engaging men more in conversations about mental health, and to create a tool that they’re likely to use. 

I started working with a talented digital artist, Dr Danny Bacchus, and with my colleague, Dr Richard Cole, and we had early discussions with third-sector mentors and found statistical research confirming that men are more willing to access information if it’s both visual and interactive. That’s the definition of a video game right there! And we’re clearly not alone; indeed, over the last decade, various games have engaged with mental health (see Firewatch, Depression Quest and That Dragon, Cancer, to name just a few), and others have been used in therapy (for instance, the use of first-person shooter games in post-traumatic stress treatments for army veterans).   

Rather than writing a narrative for our game (as there’s no single narrative around postnatal depression), we settled on creating a spatial experience. Within everyday spaces (a park, a supermarket, a kitchen, a bedroom), players’ experiences are shaped by randomly generated symptoms which affect the gameplay mechanics, from altering player movement through spaces to distorting the visual elements. 

The long game 

Now that we have a working videogame prototype, it’s time to work with partners and connections in the health sector and the third sector to test the product’s potential within the context of PND support and talking therapy, and to liaise with others to ensure its longevity as a resource. 

There’s more we want to try – for example, immersive tech (if it’s not too immersive for a complex, sensitive topic like mental health). But most importantly, we see this game as part of the Bristol Digital Game Lab’s wider philosophical and commercial agenda as a source of inspiration and a platform for the creation of games as a public service. This is something I’m passionate about, and we’re definitely making it a reality. 

You can find out more about the Bristol Digital Game Lab’s recent work – including the game jam on algorithmic bias – in their 2024 end-of-year summary and the accompanying video.  

‘Clean water shouldn’t be a luxury – it’s a fundamental right,’ says Dr Jagannath Biswakarma, Senior Research Associate in the School of Earth Sciences. For him, this mission is deeply personal, driving his research and advocacy to tackle arsenic contamination, with promising outcomes already emerging.

My research at the University focuses on understanding the complex molecular-scale processes that occur in soils and waters – especially where they interact. These processes directly impact water quality and treatment. With Associate Professor James Byrne and our team here, I’ve been working on a project that explores arsenic contamination in groundwater and how arsenic behaves under different environmental conditions.  

Areas in South East Asia – particularly northeastern India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Vietnam – are highly prone to geogenic arsenic contamination. Arsenic is deceptive: it doesn’t give any colour or taste to the water, so if you extract water from the ground and it’s clean, clear and tasteless, it’s not necessarily safe to drink. We recently discovered that the highly toxic, dominant form of arsenic in groundwater can be converted into a less mobile, less toxic form. 

Puzzle pieces on the career path 

I grew up in Assam, a region rich in biodiversity and natural resources but burdened by arsenic contamination in groundwater. Looking back, it feels like every piece of the puzzle has had a purpose in shaping me. When I was 15, I wrote an essay on environment and water pollution for my school magazine. It felt like a small act, but it gave me a sense of purpose. I had initially planned to become an aeronautical engineer and was even accepted into a program. But my grandmother gently encouraged me to reconsider. Around the same time, my mathematics teacher introduced me to biotechnology, and I found myself drawn to the environmental applications of science. I went on to study industrial biotechnology in Chennai.  

My studies took me to Japan for an internship with the Hiyoshi Corporation, where I focused on soil and water quality analysis. After returning to India, I joined the Defence Research Laboratory, investigating medicinal plant extracts as sustainable alternatives to chemical fertilizers to mitigate fungal infections in agriculture. Following graduation, I went back to Hiyoshi and helped to build a start-up in Chennai dedicated to environmental monitoring. 

After that, I spent nearly a decade in Switzerland, pursuing my postgraduate to postdoctoral studies at Eawag and in ETH Zurich, where I deepened my knowledge of geochemistry, water sustainability, and environmental regulation – and crucially, I also acquired the language of diplomacy. This skill has proven essential in transforming scientific findings into actionable policies. From there, I arrived in Bristol in 2022 at the School of Earth Sciences, which opened the door to new research and innovative approaches to addressing the arsenic problem. 

The Ronaldo of arsenic 

Research can be humbling: one day, I feel brilliant for designing an experiment, and the next, I’m rethinking everything because it didn’t work. But those challenges make the breakthroughs even more meaningful. Science isn’t interested in pleasing our egos! But it’s great at making us approach a problem in innovative ways. My friends fondly call me the ‘Ronaldo of arsenic research’ because I’m always chasing goals to mitigate this invisible crisis. And it’s true – I’m driven. 

This February, I was back in Assam to collect more groundwater samples to gain better understanding of the factors that affect the mobility and toxicity of arsenic in the region. In one village, I watched a family drawing crystal-clear water from a well that I knew was laced with arsenic, which strengthened my resolve to alert the community, as we always do in these cases. Many of these sources are also used for irrigating crops like rice, which can absorb arsenic from the water. The contamination enters the food chain, compounding the risk. But scientific research alone is not enough! 

The science diplomat 

Arsenic of any type or concentration is toxic: chronic exposure causes illnesses such as skin lesions and cancers. To solve the whole problem, we need decentralized treatment plants with a thorough protocol, skilled human resources, policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, and behavioral change experts. In short, solving the arsenic problem isn’t just about chemistry – it’s about people and policies. So, government interventions are crucial. 

In India, the Ministry of Water Resources runs the Jal Jeevan Mission, a national water distribution agency that aims to provide adequate water for everyone – but proper quality control hasn’t been a priority. To convince the government to change that, we the scientists also need to be diplomats and use appropriate language. At Eawag, I learned valuable lessons in translating research into policy from my PhD advisor, Professor Janet Hering, who was a director of one of the world-leading water research institutes in Switzerland (again, those puzzle pieces have fallen into place!).   

These conversations are now happening: in February, I was invited to an investment and infrastructure summit in Assam- Advantage Assam 2.0, inaugurated by the Prime Minister. This provided an excellent platform to share my research insights and advocate for safer water practices. Although our work is rooted in Assam, the insights we gain here at Bristol directly inform global efforts to protect communities facing similar arsenic challenges elsewhere. 

It’s a daunting challenge, but I’m committed to making a difference in these vulnerable communities — the communities I come from. Because, wherever you live, clean water shouldn’t be a luxury – it’s a fundamental right. 

Some of our tissues and organs can be pretty handy at repairing themselves – except when they’re not, for various reasons. That’s where regenerative medicine comes in. Dr Helen Weavers, Associate Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology in the School of Biochemistry, takes us into the world of tissue resilience and describes the pleasure of witnessing the wonders of natural tissue repair first-hand. 

In regenerative medicine, we explore ways to either repair or replace damaged organs or tissues in the body, whether that’s because of injury, disease or age. Some tissues in our bodies – the liver, gut and skin, for example – can naturally regenerate themselves very well, and often do so as a matter of course (although this self-repair ability declines as we get older). What can we learn from these organs, and can we extend it to other places in the body? 

The concept has been around for a while, but the technology has accelerated in the last few years, thanks to new techniques that enable us to do things like growing human tissue or an organ in the lab. This, together with our growing biological knowledge, has made the idea of regenerative medicine much closer to becoming a reality in the clinic.  

Art + science = career  

My parents tell me that as a child I always wanted to understand how things worked. I’d take things apart to figure out how they were made, then put them back together again. But I probably liked art more than science to begin with. In fact, to be a good scientist, I think you need to be quite creative and come up with new ideas and approaches. So it makes sense that I’m doing what I’m doing now. 

I studied biological sciences at university, but I didn’t really know I wanted to do research until I had a short summer project in one of the labs when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I loved developing my own ideas and designing experiments to test them. My supervisor for that project, Professor Helen Skaer, was inspirational – a really successful female group leader who also had a very active family and social life. I stayed on in her lab for a PhD, after which I came to Bristol. 

Getting the group together

Sometimes things align in delightfully unexpected ways. I’d worked on kidney biology during my PhD, then at Bristol I switched to something completely different – skin wound repair and inflammation. When I was thinking about what I wanted to focus on in my own research lab, I started exploring where else these important pathways for skin repair might be useful or important for. I hadn’t thought about the kidney for quite a few years, but after generating some intriguing data, it suddenly struck me that these two processes – how a kidney works and how skin heals itself – might actually have lots of similarities. Kidneys are constantly under stress and employ similar ‘resilience’ pathways to stay healthy. So I started my lab on that basis, and it’s what we work on now. 

The lab is in constant flux but currently has eight members. Having a whole team of people, all interested in the same fundamental biology and helping to develop the projects with their own unique ideas, makes the whole experience really exciting. Many of the PhD students and some postdocs that I supervise, work jointly with other labs and group leaders in the Faculty, which offers great opportunities to collaborate with other groups; and the students and postdocs get to experience how other groups approach research.  

Science, life and the future

I’d always read that embryos and young children heal very quickly, often without scarring, and that we lose some of that ability as we get older. But I’d had no personal experience of it – until recently, with my baby. They’ve got surprisingly sharp nails, and they often scratch themselves accidentally, and it’s amazing to see a bad-looking cut one day and think: ‘Oh my goodness, how have they done that to themselves?’ – then to find the next day that their skin is perfect again. I think it’s really cool that all these things I talk about in lectures or read about in textbooks I can now actually see for myself. 

With modern medicine enabling people to live longer, the field of healthy ageing is growing massively. There’s a big drive to make those later years healthier, for example by improving older people’s kidney, brain, or heart function. So we want to understand why a kidney works well, and then why it doesn’t work so well when you get older or have a particular disease. And then we want to use that basic science insight to come up with therapies that might, for example, prevent a kidney in an older person from losing its function as much as before. 

I’m on maternity leave at the moment, and I love spending time with my baby son, but I haven’t stopped thinking about science. I really like my keep-in-touch days when I come into the department to catch up with my lab and discuss their research. The fact that I still want to talk about the science, even during maternity leave, has made me realise this is the right career for me. 

You can read more details of Dr Weavers’ research at tissueresilience.com, and in a news article about her Women in Cell Biology Early Career Medal 2025.

To mark International Women’s Day, Ololade Adesanya, a member of the University’s Board of Trustees and Chair of the Board’s Audit and Risk Committee, shares her reflections about her mentors, turning points, and what needs to be done to create a truly diverse and equitable environment for women in business. 

Throughout my career I’ve had mentors, as well as sponsors and allies. I had a mentor when I was going through the maternity phase and I was worried about juggling professional and family life. It was a pivotal moment: I was thinking about giving up on my career and focusing on childcare because it was such a lot of work. A very senior colleague had been through a similar journey, and she showed me how to ‘flex’ my career around my family commitments. I think that’s given me a longevity that I might otherwise not have had.

I’ve also gone out myself to find mentors, to coach me through progression panels and other scenarios. I’ve learned a lot from them. And these days I mentor a lot of people myself, mostly women as well as people from ethnic minority backgrounds. I’m also very passionate about increasing diversity across all sectors, and in governance positions.

A turning point

I studied law at university, then became a chartered accountant with the ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales), and I was fortunate to progress quickly, but there came a point when I realised that I needed more than technical skills if I was going to get beyond a certain level. I needed the ‘soft skills’, particularly around networking and relationship-building, as well as managing 360.

I did get mentors, and I also started to watch people in the roles above me. I took away a few things from that: networking more and being more connected to community activities. These days I spend time connecting people with each other and with opportunities, going to networking events and being active on social media, to the point where some people call me the Networking Queen! I think that’s paid a lot of dividends.

Women in business: a changing landscape

We’ve made progress, but in pockets: when you look at the FTSE Board, it’s still male-dominated and with very few ethnic minorities. There’s data to prove that, but you don’t even need data – you just need to look and it’s very obvious! And it’s similar in all the senior management roles across all industries. Even in the higher education sector, particularly for the top institutions, there still isn’t that much representation of your demographics – in our case, the demographics in Bristol or in the UK overall.

I feel that there’s got to be intentional allyship – boards need to ensure that they’re getting balance. And actually our Chair, Jack Boyer, is constantly thinking about diversity on the Board of Trustees. Organisations also need to have inclusive policies in place so that the working environment allows people to be themselves, because they perform best when they’re authentic – and more importantly, they feel empowered to progress.

So how are you going to accelerate your female and your Black employees and support them to progress into senior levels? It needs representation at the top – because representation matters. A lot of research shows that, when we see people who look like us at the top, that position feels more achievable.

Fixing the ‘missing middle’

A lot of women drop out of their careers in that late-20s to mid-30s phase – the ‘missing middle’ – when many choose to become parents and start to fall off the career ladder. In some cases, working practices are just not conducive to combining career with parenting.

The advice I always give working mums that I mentor is to see your career as a rubber ball that you can amend and shape to suit your lifestyle. That might mean that you work part-time until your kids grow up, then you go back to working full-time.

I’m really pleased that a lot of employment practices are supportive of women combining work and family: there’s flexible working, and particularly post-pandemic, there’s hybrid working. Some women are fortunate to have support from their partners, and the growth of paternity leave is encouraging more men to help with childcare. I do hope that trend will encourage women to stay on in the future.

So my advice would be don’t give up. Instead of coming completely out of the system, stay on. Change your approach, change your style, change direction if you must, but don’t give up that career.

 

‘Cats are an oddity’, says Dr Emily Blackwell, who should know: she’s Senior Lecturer in Animal Behaviour and Welfare at Bristol Veterinary School and Director of the Bristol Cats Study. Dr Blackwell discusses matters canine and (mostly) feline, and how her work can sometimes require skills associated with a certain fictional Victorian detective. She begins with two ‘career origin stories’, in the interests of balance: a dog one and a cat one.  

When I was a child, our school playing fields backed onto our garden and I used to hear my dog howling sometimes if Mum had gone out and left her at home. At the time, I didn’t know that dogs could have separation issues, but it got me interested in the different ways our pets behave, especially ways that make life uncomfortable – both for us and for them. 

My grandma had a rescue cat called Rusty who would hide under the bed, and if you had bare feet, she would come out and attack them. My brother and I were desperate to stroke her and play with her, but she was just too frightened. Feeling sympathy for Rusty probably sparked my interest in cats and their psychological needs.  

When I started my research into companion animal behaviour and welfare, it was mainly with dogs, because the Dogs Trust funded my first lectureship. Then about seven years ago I began managing the Bristol Cats Study. I don’t have much time for clinical work these days, but in my spare time I treat pets with various behaviour problems, and I teach on our veterinary and vet nursing courses.    

Kittens of the 2010s 

The Bristol Cats Study is ‘the cat version of Children of the 90s’. It was set up in 2010 on a shoestring, then Cats Protection started funding it, and now we also have funding from Waltham Petcare Science Institute. We recruited kittens aged between eight and 16 weeks – 2,400 of them in the end, quite impressive before social media was a thing – and we have just under a thousand left, which isn’t bad. Some, sadly, have died, others’ owners have dropped out of the study or moved. 

Everyone involved in the cat world always says that cat owners go above and beyond, so if you’re interviewing a cat owner, allow double the amount of time you would a dog owner. But they’re amazing – without them we couldn’t do the study.  

Bristol Cats has had a direct impact on policy: for instance, Cats Protection want to find out whether early neutering impacts upon a range of health issues, including obesity, and the results of that study will be published soon. Also, we’ve characterised the feline gut microbiome for the first time, and two papers on that are due this year.  

Sanity claws 

Cats are an oddity. Their ancestral species is the African Wildcat, which is solitary, but through domestication they’ve developed an ability to form social groups. Pet cats can live relatively harmoniously, providing they’ve got the right household environment and resources, but there are things that owners might not notice – for example, that one cat might be sitting staring in a doorway and blocking the other cat’s access. 

The biggest cause of stress for pet cats is probably other cats. We usually do home visits for cat behaviour problems, and we ask questions about how they interact or react to different things: how do they react to strangers, to familiar people, to dogs in the household? Do other cats stare at them through the window? My favourite thing about being a clinician is that you’re a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, looking for clues and trying to work out how certain behaviour has developed, and how we can unpick that.

If you’re leading an observational study rather than doing clinical work, it can be a little frustrating: you’re observing what happens in the natural time course of the cats, and it’s really important that you don’t intervene. Owners will often say ‘There’s something going on between our cats’, and I’ll be longing to get in there and work it out. Obviously, if there’s a serious problem, we’ll direct them to an appropriate place, but we have to refrain from stepping in. 

Moving furward  

I’ve done quite a lot of TV work, which has been fantastic: I can see clients one-on-one in the clinic, which is really rewarding, but I can only see so many, whereas the first programme that I did – for a Channel 4 series called Dogs: Their Secret Lives – had two million viewers, and I had a full inbox the next day. A bit overwhelming, but it really opened my eyes to the impact you can have as an expert by working with the media.  

Anyone can call themselves a behaviourist, but I’ve spent most of my career trying to establish recognised ‘gold standard’ qualifications, and now our Veterinary Nursing degree is accredited with a professional body for clinical animal behaviourists. I sit on the committee for that organisation and help to set standards, which has been really gratifying. 

With Bristol Cats, what we want to do next is follow kittens from birth. That’s trickier, but early-life environment is critical to later behaviour. We also plan to look at rescue cats that are rehomed: what makes for a successful rehoming, and if it goes wrong, why? I’m quite excited about that side of things.  

As the University announces that it is taking the first steps towards opening a second micro-campus in Hartcliffe, Tara Miran, Civic Engagement Manager for the University’s Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus (TQEC), traces her path to this point, reflects on her drive to connect people, and looks to the future as she takes on the management of the University’s Barton Hill micro-campus. 

In a way, what has fuelled my desire to work in community engagement is my heritage. I’m Kurdish but I grew up in London, so I also identify as a Londoner and as a Bristolian.  

Kurdistan’s history over the last 100 years has seen war, displacement, genocide, civil unrest and colonisation. It’s now divided into four areas of land between different countries, and South Kurdistan, where I’m from, is the only one with an established Kurdish regional government (KRG), following elections in 1992. The Kurdish people’s ongoing struggle for fairness and justice drives me in a lot of what I do.  

I worked in the Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector, then I went into Community Development at Bristol City Council. I worked with great grassroots initiatives that communities of the global majority and equalities groups are driving across our city, and I was able to serve as a bridge between these groups and the Council. I’d conducted some research for Bristol Women’s Voice and the Women’s Commission, interviewing women from the global majority who live around Temple Quarter about the barriers they faced to their career aspirations. In the process, I met Vanessa Kisuule, a city poet who was commissioning some poems for the Temple Quarter project, and she invited me to write one – which I did. So when this civic engagement post came up at the University, it had my name all over it.  

Community, family – and dentistry 

Lots of communities around the world can’t speak up for justice or fairness. I think that if I have the privilege and the ability to effect positive change, then I should be doing it. When it feels like the right thing to do, it doesn’t always feel like ‘hard work’, but there are the days and the nights where you’re physically tired and frustrated. That’s why it’s important to remain persistent and hopeful. 

Everyone should have access to basic services, like a dentist. When we were campaigning to save the St Paul’s Dental Practice, sometimes it was just me and my children handing out flyers or having conversations with local people. I would tell myself “Carry on, there’s going to be a light at the end”. Eventually, I’d get phone calls from media outlets, asking for an interview, and The Bristol Cable supported us all along. Gradually, like-minded people joined the campaign; when people also start giving back good energy and contributions, it fuels you to carry on. Community action is powerful and magical.   

I always have a group of people around me with similar passions and energy. And I have to give credit to my family: my children are always up for a good cause, and my husband is like my backbone. But people like me who are sometimes called ‘activists’ don’t want to always be campaigning for basic provision and services for our communities; we want to enjoy life. That’s why it’s important that we work effectively together to bring about positive change.  

Bristol bridges 

Coming into this job supporting civic engagement around Temple Quarter, I wanted to be a bridge between diverse local communities and the University, and a catalyst for meaningful conversations. Some communities are referred to as those of multiple deprivation, but they are also full of diverse, rich assets and possibilities! I’d like to think that people know me as someone who gets things done, who’s authentic, who is of these communities. I’m visibly a Muslim woman, and I’m in a minority in many places, including at the University, so representation and inclusion are very important to me.  

Now that I also manage Barton Hill micro-campus, working with the Civic Engagement team, we can continue the great things that have been going on there. I’ve got quite a wide network because of my previous work within Bristol – it’s like a directory in my head – so I’m keen to see how I can further enrich and contribute to the micro-campus’s journey.  

We’re also using everything we’ve done at Barton Hill and engaging with our civic partners and networks to think about how we’re creating the civic spaces at TQEC. How do we make them inclusive, so that there’s equity of use for city partners, equalities groups, staff and students when the campus opens in September 2026?   

One of the things I’m looking forward to seeing come to fruition on the Temple Quarter campus is the Story Exchange. This is a place for curating conversations between people with very different perspectives and experiences. It’s designed as a circle, so all perspectives are equal. We do this in different cultures across the world and throughout history– sitting in circles, sharing challenges, working on things together.

This is the focus of one of our current participatory art commissions, Charting Change.  I’m very excited to see how that all develops and how civic engagement will look and feel in TQEC.  

Technicians are a breed apart, but they’re also to be found working throughout the University. Fred Hale, Technical Safety Business Partner in Safety and Health Services, bangs the drum for these often ‘hidden’ heroes and heroines, explains Bristol’s commitment to its technical staff, points out one piece of their handiwork on another planet, and recalls his own lightbulb moment. 

When you hear the word ‘technician’, you might picture somebody coming out of a cupboard in an overall and putting some Bunsen burners out. Many of them do set up or run practical teaching sessions, and sometimes Bunsen burners are involved – but our technicians work at every grade in almost every department, and they contribute to teaching design as well.  

Technicians also support sustainability agendas: they worked with our Sustainability team to help Bristol become the first university in the world to achieve Green Labs Certification across the whole institution. During the pandemic, they weren’t just on site keeping the lights on – they also played a big role in developing some of the distance learning. And since they’re not part of the assessment process, technical staff can be a sort of ‘safe space’: they give students a lot of moral support and advice. 

Bristol, Japan, Mars…   

Whenever there’s a practical element, there are technicians playing a key role. That’s as true of departments in Arts as anywhere else – we’ve got technicians running sound studios in Music, working in Theatre, in Archaeology, and so on.  

Our technical staff make all kinds of other contributions behind the scenes. At the Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information, we have very low-vibration laboratories that provide a sort of blank canvas for very small forces, and we were contacted by the Mars InSight mission. They wanted to test a vibrometer they were sending to Mars to measure the vibrations of the inner planet. So our technicians provided the environment, set up the equipment and ran the test. The vibrometer’s still up there, sending back information.   

Not only that, but the technical workshop in the Faculty of Science and Engineering was involved in developing the drones that flew over Fukushima to test the radiation in the area after the 2011 nuclear accident there. They did a lot of work on the design of the drones and their sensors. 

Getting technical

I was very much into aeroplanes as a child. I joined the Air Cadets, and we would fly Chipmunks and gliders out at Weston airport, but we’d also go to RAF stations, look round the hangars and watch the mechanics servicing the aircraft, and learn how the ejector seats worked. Seeing what everyone did to enable those planes to get into the air made me want to be a technician – and I started in the aerospace industry, with an apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce. 

Technical roles can combine intellectual challenge, knowledge and practical application. They’re a lot of fun – you get to play with interesting things and tackle a lot of stimulating challenges. Technicians definitely have shared traits: we enjoy helping people, and we enjoy seeing the light come on in someone’s eyes or watching something being achieved.   

There’s a common bond in technical teams. Their disciplines are very different, but their roles are quite similar. They’re often in those roles for their whole career, and very passionate about their subject.  

Making the commitment 

The Technician Commitment came about in 2017, driven by technicians with support from the Gatsby Foundation. Bristol was one of the first institutions to sign up – we already knew that we wanted to be much better in this area and to recognise the value that technicians bring to our work here.  

The Technician Commitment is a pledge from the organisation, and it looks at several pillars: acknowledging technical staff and their contributions; career development; and sustainability. We’ve just won an impact award for our third submission under the Commitment, in which we had to demonstrate how we’re progressing in those pillars and provide action plans signed by the Vice-Chancellor. 

We were quite pioneering at Bristol, and Staff Development and other teams at Bristol – in faculties, in Sustainability and elsewhere – have been very supportive and encouraging from early on. Our technical career framework is used and adopted across the sector as an example of good practice. We have communities and networks for research technicians and teaching technicians, and they often visit each other’s labs and share their approaches.  

The environment is always changing a little bit around us. We keep a weather eye on skills and how young people may enter technical roles, for example via T-levels or other qualifications. Other universities ask us about career frameworks and how they can adopt some of the things we do – I think that’s a sign that we’re in quite a good place. 

Bid for a world-class AI computer, then build it in record time and run it all? Certainly – just don’t look down. After the government’s recent launch of its AI Opportunities Action Plan, Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, Director of the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS), describes the 30–year path that led to Isambard-AI. 

Getting Isambard-AI built has been like having kids or walking a tightrope. If you really thought about what you were attempting, you’d talk yourself out of it. So, you just do it and tell yourself it’ll be fine. And so far, it is. 

If you stepped inside my office at the University you’d find a makeshift museum of Bristol tech artefacts dating from the early 1990s to now, guarded by a life-size cutout of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the namesake for our series of supercomputers. After arriving in the city in ’94, I worked in the semi-conductor industry, then in various high-tech start-ups, producing advanced graphics processors. Then I co-founded Clear Speed; in my latter years there I worked with various universities, including Bristol. My collaborators said they were looking for someone to come and work in high-performance computing – would I be interested? So, when a post came up in 2009, I jumped across and never looked back. 

The High-Performance Computing Research Group, which I created in 2010, has grown rapidly. When the government put out a call for a new AI facility in summer 2023, we put in a proposal. They did due diligence on us, then asked: ‘If money was no object, what’s your limit?’ I’ve never had that happen before in my entire career! Our limit was the power supply we had at our supercomputer site at the National Composites Centre (NCC) – up to five megawatts. ‘Okay’, they said, ‘build us a five-megawatt AI supercomputer – how much would that cost?’ The answer was £211 million and the total running cost over five or six years is over £300 million, so it’s about a third of a billion pounds in total. 

1k to 128Gb to…? 

It’s all a far cry from when I was in the school computer club in the 1980s, using a BBC Micro B. My family couldn’t afford a home computer, but I was round my friends’ houses on their ZX Spectrums and so on, typing in programmes out of the backs of magazines – that sounds crazy now, doesn’t it?! 

The ZX-81 had 1k of memory and the ZX Spectrum started with about 16k; the Commodore 64 had 64k. These computers had an unbelievably tiny fraction of the power we’ve got now: one of the most recent bits of hardware on my office shelf has a GPU with 96 gigabytes of memory on the chip, and a CPU with another 128 gigabytes of memory. That’s eight million times more memory in about 40 years – Moore’s Law at work. 

The graphics chip I worked on in 2000 had 70 million transistors – one of the biggest chips that had ever been made at the time. We’ve gone from that to 70 billion transistors in 2024. Today AI is very much driving the incredibly rapid rate of improvement in processor technologies. 

Getting to grips with AI 

Artificial intelligence is at the start of its hype cycle. It’ll start to calm down once people stop expecting it to be able to do everything, and then it’ll become widely adopted for the things that it’s really good at. Today people have similar concerns about AI as they once did about computers in general, or with the early internet; but typically these new technologies eventually become net contributors to our quality of life. 

As with the internet, there could be misinformation or deepfakes, and there’s already lots of work underway to find ways of defending against them. The AI Safety Institute, a new government agency that will tackle a lot of these things head-on, is an early user of Isambard-AI. 

We expect Isambard-AI to evolve quite rapidly. There are research groups in AI-based drug design and discovery who are among our first users. There’s a genetic modelling project that could lead to a better understanding of how cancer works – a computational challenge that was beyond this team until Isambard-AI came along. We’re having conversations about climate modeling and other potential uses every day. 

Isambard-AI allows us to do things only Meta, Amazon or Google could do until now – it’s brilliant to be putting these tools and capabilities into the hands of scientists across the UK. 

Heating up 

Within six months, Isambard-AI part one was up and running, while part two – the main part – is due online this summer. It’s really exciting to challenge prevailing wisdom. For example, we’ve learned a lot about how to build a supercomputer much more quickly than usual. The quicker you can do it, the more science you can get done sooner – and the faster taxpayers’ money can bring benefits. 

The University’s energy supply is all renewable and we’re building one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers ever. The waste heat from the system is all captured in the form of hot water. In Scandinavia, they plug this waste hot water into district heating circuits for local homes. We’re in talks with our local council about whether we can do the same. That’s the next challenge. 

When I eventually retire, my ambition would be for BriCS to be running multiple future generations of Isambard, providing an exceptional service supporting amazing science around the UK, with waste energy helping the local community. Then, I’ll be happy to leave BriCS in someone else’s capable hands to run!