Engineering news
Leading British engineer and inventor Sir James Dyson has donated £12 million to help fund a new school of engineering targeting female students at Imperial College London.
The school, named after Dyson, will be housed on London’s Exhibition Road, in a former Royal Mail building recently purchased for Imperial from The Science Museum. The purchase was made possible by a donation from the James Dyson Foundation.
On average, only 12.9% of applicants to engineering courses are female, Dyson said. By championing “creativity as well as theory”, the Dyson School of Design Engineering will aim to attract a much higher percentage of females. The company said 40% of all applications for places at the Dyson School for 2015 have been from women.
The first 40 undergraduate students to enrol in the Dyson School of Design Engineering will use Imperial’s current facilities from October. The annual intake will increase to 90 by October 2017, when teaching moves to the new building. The school will be kitted out with industry standard equipment and studio space, Dyson said, enabling 400 students to design, prototype and test their inventions.
Chancellor George Osborne called for more women to train as engineers this week. He said there was “a whole load of attitudes and assumptions in society" about women's roles that needed to change.
Dyson said: “We want to create engineers who are bold and commercially astute. They will use their skills, nurtured in the Dyson School, to develop future technology that will catalyse Britain's economic growth.”
London’s South Kensington, where the new school will be based, is a traditional centre of learning, innovation and inspiration in the arts and sciences. Built from the legacy of The Great Exhibition of 1851, the area was originally known as Albertopolis – a tribute to Prince Albert who suggested that the financial surplus from the 1851 exhibition should be used to found a number of educational establishments on the land available nearby.
Osborne added: “What Britain needs to do more of in the future as an economy and as a society, we need to bring together science and creativity and invention, and it's about that and the commercial application of those things.
“One of the most exciting things at the moment is there are many more women and girls in school doing maths and engineering subjects, considering that as a career after university.
“It is changing and, of course, you've got to change a whole load of attitudes and assumptions in society.
“But I think the more that women see role models such as the fantastic women that are on the course here, they will see that this is a great career for them. So, the progress is there."
Professor Alice Gast, president of Imperial College London, said: “Design combines the best of technical expertise with creativity, and the Dyson School of Design Engineering is uniquely placed to bring these together in its student experience and research.
She said that Imperial and Dyson shared a vision in which engineers were educated to be innovative. “The James Dyson Foundation's generous donation, along with Dyson's industrial expertise, gives us the opportunity to create a world-leading school for a new kind of engineer to design the future.”