Lord Alec Broer, Crossbench Peer, Member of the Science and Technology Select Committee

Contacts

House of Lords, London, SW1A 0PW Tel: 020 7219 5353

Career

Alec Broers is former Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and was President of Royal Academy of Engineering from 2001 to 2006. Having been knighted in 1998 and made a Life Peer in 2004, Lord Broers has been Chairman of the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee (2004-2007) and is also chairman of the board of directors of the Diamond Light Source. He is also a Chairman of the Bio-Nano Centre. He serves on the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Foresight Panel on Information Technology and the NATO Special Panel on Nanoscience .

Education

He was educated at Melbourne University(Degree in Physics) and the University of Cambridge(Degree in Electrical Sciences) and worked in the Research & Development laboratories of IBM in the USA for nineteen years, becoming an IBM Fellow and ultimately holding responsibility for the development of chip technologies. After researching for IBM during a key period of computer development, he became a professor of electrical engineering and began a nanofabrication laboratory, where he used a scanning electron microscope to create electrical parts at the atomic scale.

Issues

Research and Development

Laison Committee: Third Report, 26 March 2012 [1]

The most effective way to rebuild our economy is to restore our industrial leadership in the manufacturing of innovative products. This will only happen if we regain competitiveness in research and development. This is the business of the Science and Technology Select Committee. We inquire into whether our educational system is producing the graduates needed by industry for its R&D activities, whether the Government are using their procurement effectively to stimulate innovation, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has said, and we inquire into the state of specific industries such as nuclear power.

Links

The Triumph of Technology –in five lecturs Lord Boers sets his belief how the technology should hold the key for the future.