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SGR sponsors are eminent individuals in science, design and/or technology who lend their name publicly in support of SGR
Peter
Ahrends is one of a group of architects who, in 1961, founded an architectural
partnership known as Ahrends Burton and Koralek.
From the outset the partnership was convinced that the process of architectural design should be broadly and deeply inclusive of factors such as the environment, the context and, not least, the social framework(s) in which buildings function to meet briefs, serve people and create new horizons.
In the early and mid seventies the partnership came to explore and understand the significance of the raft of issues now commonly referred to under the inclusive heading of ‘sustainability’. Based upon research they soon applied themselves to these issues making innovative and early contributions in a variety of fields of architecture: public housing, NHS hospitals, education, factories and offices. This strand of their work, developing in parallel with research, is centrally embodied as a significant aspiration as the increasing urgency for design action becomes evident.
From this perspective (based upon theory and practice) it is Peter's pleasure to endorse and support the aims and aspirations of SGR reaching out to the influential fields of science, technology, architecture and design, addressing the urgent needs for the survival and wellbeing of our planet.
Alan Baxter set up his own engineering practice, Alan Baxter Associates, in 1974.
As a member of SGR's National Coordinating Committee, Roy's biography can be found on the NCC Biographies page
Edward Cullinan established his own practice of architects, Edward Cullinan Associates in 1959. He is a member of the Royal Academy and a Trustee of the John Soane Museum.
Stephen Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. His work has been essential in understanding and classifying black holes and he has also popularised the subject through books including A Brief History of Time and The Universe In A Nutshell. He has won numerous awards including, in 2006, the Royal Society's Copley Medal, the world's oldest award for scientific achievement. Further information can be found on his website.
Tom
Kibble studied mathematics and physics at Edinburgh University and obtained
a PhD in mathematical physics in 1958, working on some aspects of quantum field
theory. He then spent a year as a Commonwealth Fund Fellow at the California
Institute of Technology, before coming to Imperial College as a postdoctoral
fellow. In 1961 he joined the staff as a lecturer, and was made Professor of
Theoretical Physics in 1970. From 1983 to 1991 he was Head of the Physics Department.
He retired in 1998 and is now an Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow.
Tom Kibble's main research interests have been in quantum field theory, the theory of elementary particles and their interactions, especially on the phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking and its implications, both in cosmology and in condensed-matter physics. He has recently chaired a European Science Foundation programme Cosmology in the Laboratory. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980 and awarded a CBE in 1998.
During the 50s and 60s, Tom Kibble, like many other physicists, became increasingly concerned about the military applications and militarization of science and about the dangers inherent in the nuclear arms race, especially following the close shave with global disaster of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. One of the main issues at the time was the effects of fallout of radioactive material from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, leading to the long and ultimately successful campaign to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere, and eventually all nuclear tests above a very low threshold.
Tom Kibble joined the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS) soon after it was formed, and was a member of its National Committee from 1970 to 1977, and chair from 1974 to 1977. He was also an early member of Scientists Against Nuclear Arms (SANA), SGR's predecessor, on the National Coordinating Committee from 1981 to 1991 and chair from 1985 to 1991. One of his contributions was to chair the organizing committee of the Second International Scientists' Congress, Ways out of the Arms Race, held at Imperial College in 1988. He has been a trustee of both the Science and Society Trust and the Martin Ryle Trust associated with SGR.
As a member of SGR's National Coordinating Committee, Kate's biography can be found on the NCC Biographies page
Rick runs his own practice, Rick Mather Architects, one of whose specialities is environmentally sustainable design. He sets the design direction of the practice as a whole as well as designing and reviewing all projects on a regular basis.
A native of Oregon, Rick came to the UK to study urban design at the Architectural Association. His work has since been published and exhibited around the world including the acclaimed South Bank Masterplan. He recently featured high on the list of Building magazine’s most influential people in the industry. He has served on councils of the RIBA and the Architectural Association and is a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum. For further information, see his own website.
Research
work for John Nye began during World War II at the Cavendish Laboratory, where
he studied under Sir Lawrence Bragg and Professor E. Orowan. The topic was metal physics, but following Orowan’s
insight that glaciers flowed just like a metal near its melting point, John
turned to glaciology—testing theory against field evidence. He became successively President of the International
Glaciological Society and President of the International Commission for Snow
and Ice. The use of radio echo sounding
in glaciology later led him to wave physics and the notion of wave vortices,
now part of the new subject of singularity optics. His present position is Emeritus Professor of
Physics at the University of Bristol.
John Nye does not think that scientists, as such, are generally any wiser in social matters than other professionals. He does believe, however, that when political issues arise that involve science and its applications they do have an obligation to do what they can to influence events for the better by using, not only their specialised knowledge, but their general experience of the way science functions as a cooperative social activity joining scholars from all over the world. That is why he is glad to be associated with SGR.
William
Powrie is Professor of Geotechnical Engineering and Head of the
Martin Rees is President of the Royal Society and also Master of Trinity College, and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. He is also Visiting Professor at Leicester University and Imperial College London. He was appointed Astronomer Royal in 1995, and was nominated to the House of Lords in 2005 as a cross-bench peer.
He has served on many bodies connected with education, space research, arms control and international collaboration in science. Further information can be found on his website.
Richard
Rogers is one of the foremost living architects, the recipient of the prestigious
RIBA Gold Medal in 1985 and winner of the 1999 Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
Medal, the 2000 Praemium Imperiale Prize for Architecture and the 2006 Golden
Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Lord Rogers was awarded the Légion d'Honneur in 1986, knighted in 1991 and made a life peer in 1996. In 1995 he was the first architect ever invited to give the BBC Reith Lectures a series entitled Cities for a Small Planet and in 1998 was appointed by the Deputy Prime Minister to chair the UK Government's Urban Task Force. He is Chief Advisor on Architecture and Urbanism to the Mayor of London, and was recently appointed Chair of the Greater London Authority's Design for London Advisory Group, and also serves as Adviser to the Mayor of Barcelona's Urban Strategies Council. Richard Rogers has also served as Chairman of the Tate Gallery and Deputy Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain. He is currently a Trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Richard Rogers is best known for such pioneering buildings as the Centre Pompidou, the headquarters for Lloyd's of London, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the Millennium Dome in London. His practice Richard Rogers Partnership (RRP) was founded in 1977, and has offices in London, Barcelona, Madrid and Tokyo. It also has a wealth of experience in urban masterplanning with major schemes in London, Lisbon, Berlin, New York and Seoul.
Gavin
Strang grew up on a farm in rural Perthshire. He was educated at Edinburgh and
Cambridge Universities and worked as a scientist with the Animal Breeding Organisation
in Edinburgh.
He was elected to the House of Commons as the Member of Parliament for Edinburgh East in 1970. He has served on Select Committees for Science and Technology, Scotland and Agriculture. In Opposition he has been a spokesperson on Scottish affairs and Employment. From 1992 to 1997 he was his party's principal spokesperson on Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
He served as an energy Minister in 1974 and Parliament Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from 1974 to 1979. From 1997 to 1998 he was the Cabinet Minister responsible for Transport.
In 1987 he successfully introduced the Aids (Control) Act under the private Member's Bill procedure and has continued to take an interest in HIV/AIDS issues both at home and abroad.
As a member of Scientists Against Nuclear Arms (SANA), the fore-runner organisation to SGR, he campaigned against the deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe by the US and the USSR. He opposed the deployment of Trident and advocates a non-nuclear defence policy. He opposed the Iraq war, was and is against replacing Trident.
He is Chairman to the All Party Parliamentary Group for World Government and is a Trustee of the One World Trust.
Gavin Strang strongly supports the work of SGR.
Derek Sugden, Structural Engineer and Acoustician, was a founder Partner and Principal of both ARUP Associates and Acoustics. He has been involved in the creation and conservation of many concert halls and opera houses in the UK and Europe over many years, including the Snape Concert Hall, the Theatre Royal Glasgow, auditoria at various Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, and the Buxton and Glyndebourne Opera Houses.
David Webb is Professor of Engineering Modelling, Head of the Centre for Applied Research in Engineering, and Director of the Praxis Centre at Leeds Metropolitan University. He obtained a DPhil in space physics in 1975 from the University of York and, after periods as a post-doctoral researcher at Bell Laboratories and the University of York, joined the Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence at the Ministry of Defence in London in 1978. He moved to the Computer Unit at Leeds Metropolitan University in 1979 and then into the School of Engineering in the early 1980s. He has published widely on the application of engineering modelling, and on nuclear disarmament and the militarisation of space. He is currently working with colleagues in the Praxis Centre on the study of information and technology in peace, conflict resolution and human rights.
As
a social scientist John Westergaard is rather rare among SGR's sponsors. However,
SGR's aims are plainly as fully salient for social science as for natural science,
technology, design and architecture - that is, to promote humane values in research
and practice, and to resist contrary pressures from either complacent convention
or the too-particular interests of funders.
Among influences that led John into academic social science were adolescent experience of Nazi occupation in Denmark (where he was at secondary school) and puzzlement over the twists and traumas of political responses to that occupation. Issues of and around policy have preoccupied him ever since. After graduation in sociology in 1951 from the London School of Economics, his research - there, at UCL, and then from 1975 with a chair at Sheffield - focussed on two main fields: first on urban development, housing provision and land-use planning; later and principally on class inequality and related economic and political processes.
In both fields, John's work came to centre on the often unacknowledged (and since the mid-1970s notably sharpening) persistence of relative class inequalities despite growth of 'average affluence'; and on the subtleties of 'power' involved, when the tenacity of unequal socio-economic structure derives as much from dominant though little-stated assumptions in public and private policy about 'the limits to change' as from overt exercise of superior clout.
These preoccupations figure strongly in John's support for SGR, although his research has not directly been concerned with natural science and technology or their social ramifications. To such credentials as he brings to sponsorship of SGR, John also sees the responsibilities of all scientists, 'social' as well as 'natural', to include not only rigorous pursuit of factual evidence, however this may confound either personal or wider expectations; but also alert concern with the uses to which outcomes may then be put. This is of course much easier to say than to do; but it is more readily done with collective backing from a body such as SGR.
Mark
Whitby is a founder and a director of the engineering consulting firm Whitbybird
and a past president of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He has an appetite
for innovation, imaginative design solutions, new ways of working and the delivery
of a sustainable future. He is a Visiting Professor at Nottingham University.
A former Olympian, Mark Whitby is married with five children and lives on a smallholding in Hertfordshire. He is trying to make his life as self-sufficient as possible and is a signatory of Colin Challen’s 25% CO2 reduction pledge although he expects things to get worse before they get better.
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