Interview with Julia Sutcliffe

Julia was born in Manchester in the late 1960s, she has one sister, a brother and two stepbrothers. She says of her childhood. “It was a happy childhood. I have fond memories of watching programmes like Tomorrow’s World that brought science and technology and the latest innovations into the living room. None of my family worked in the field of science or technology, but I very much liked discovering things and my curiosity was encouraged. I remember at early age leafing through the collection of Black’s Children’s encyclopaedias, the ‘Animal World’ compendium I had been given from Christmas and various Ladybird books on British Mammals, British Birds, Trees, Minerals, the Seaside etc at my grandparent’s house.

We lived in the countryside which I adored, and in the school holidays we would visit zoos, country hall gardens and ‘feats of engineering’, such as the opening of Humber bridge and the Harrier jump jet at a windswept airfield in Yorkshire. But it was Jodrell Bank that made a really lasting impression. My grandparents took me to Jodrell Bank, the big radio telescope in Cheshire, when it opened, and that was one of those moments where I was just struck by the fact that science and technology could answer a whole set of questions, and that people did that for a day job. And I was lucky enough to be allowed to purchase two pocketbooks, from the Gift shop, one on Astronomy, and one on Physics, both of which I still have to this day. It was a time of wonder.’

Julia attended a girl’s grammar school in York where she focused on the sciences up to O levels. She then went to a co-educational sixth form college to study physics, maths and chemistry for A level.

‘I loved learning, loved creating and doing, so at school, I really enjoyed art, sport, and many subjects, but particularly, my fascination with science, discovery and explanation grew and was very much encouraged at my grammar school. I ended up opting for Physics as a result – it seemed a plucky subject that attempted through tickertape trolleys and ripple tanks, to explain the fundamental laws of the universe!

After A levels, Julia went on to Nottingham University to study physics degree and followed on with a PhD in physics. She says of the experience: “I had really, supportive lecturers and supervisors who were brilliant.  It was obviously quite a male-dominated course, but it didn’t strike me, in any way, shape or form, as limiting what you could do as a female in science and technology.  It was entirely supportive and a brilliant environment.”

‘And I thoroughly enjoyed working with the team to study the transition between quantum and classical regimes. These are very different constructs as far as explanations of the laws of physics are concerned but we worked at low temperature and utilised nuclear magnetic resonance to observe quantum mechanical and classical behaviours in compounds. It was great fun being in the department, I enjoyed being part of the physics community, attending conferences, developing papers and have fond memories of that time.

After completing her PhD, Julia took six months off to travel, visiting India, Nepal, Pakistan and Thailand. She says: “I was really keen, having spent so long at university, to go and see something of another part of the world and see how other people lived. I had interrailed around Europe whilst an undergraduate and I had observed my friends who’d completed their bachelor’s degrees go off and travel around India, South-east Asia, Australia etc and I wanted to see things. My objectives were to ride a camel across the desert, ride an elephant through the jungle and see some high mountains. And these things I did in my six months in India, Thailand, Nepal and Pakistan’.

In 1996, upon returning from six months travelling, Julia took a job at British Aerospace in Bristol. Her career with the company would last for twenty-six years.

 “When I first went to work with the team in Bristol at the corporate research centre,  I was surrounded by scientists, physicists, metallurgists, chemists, engineers, so I certainly felt very much at home in that atmosphere.  We were pushing the boundaries of robotics, of early-stage Wi-Fi networks, of autonomous systems using Artificial Intelligence, of data fusion, of different materials and sensing technology.  It felt like we were at the cutting edge of applied research. We had a network of academics that we worked with very closely, so that was great, having done a PhD to then see that on the other side in industry, there were great benefits in a strong relationship with academia.”

Julia spent three years in the corporate research centre and collaborated with teams in Oxford University and Sydney University’s Field Robotics Centre. The opportunity to work with the Australian team Julia says, ‘meant that we could drive some of the technologies that we’d been developing, to the next level of demonstration through using small aircraft systems. Through that dialogue and collaboration, I ended up visiting Australia and met the team that were based at the Melbourne office and who were keen to utilise some of the skillsets that I’d acquired at the corporate research centre. … I still very much wanted to travel and explore, so when I had the opportunity to move across to the Australian arm of the business, I jumped at the chance and had a fantastic time over there.”

Julia spent ten wonderful years from 1999 to 2009 in Australia where she continued her focus on artificial intelligence, digitisation and autonomy. She adds: “I worked across a whole range of systems, working with the defence customers to support them in developing understanding of how they could utilise these new technologies that were really coming into the fore because of the availability of massive computer power and good communications.  It really opened up the aperture for a whole range of other technologies.”

Julia says that of working in such a large and international organisation, not only allowed her to make many wonderful friends, but also gave her the opportunity to be part of a global “network of scientists, technologists, engineers working across international boundaries to collaborate and push the frontiers”.

‘Much of what we were doing at the time involved pushing the limits of what could be achieved with networks of autonomous systems, and so we developed multiple testbeds and experimental aircraft systems and would develop and test the robustness of networks of self-navigating systems, multi-sensor data fusion and machine decision-making in harsh environments, including for example, GPS-denial and communications outage. Uncrewed systems were emerging and becoming more capable, so this was an exciting time. Of course, this involved travelling to various test sites around Australia for this purpose and I have stayed in some fairly salubrious accommodation from roadside motels, rocket ranges and sheep-shearers huts in the outback, but all of which, added to the adventure and allowed me to develop great friendships that I still have today’.

In 2010, Julia returned to the UK and joined what she describes as the headquarters of the aircraft part of the business, in the north-west of England. She worked on a range of new technology, demonstrator, and new aircraft programmes sponsored by the Royal Air Force in the UK, and co-sponsored by other air forces. She held design authority for the mission systems of a number of these demonstrator programmes and worked with the teams to develop safe systems of use for some of the emerging autonomous capabilities.

She says: “That’s one of the interesting things about the industry, it’s a well-connected industry and  it tries to solve some really hard science problems, and in doing so, drives technology application. When you think about the number of things that need optimising, the number of challenges that need solving to make something incredibly complicated, very highly integrated do a set of really challenging things at the limits of capability and get it to work every single time, reliably, repeatedly, it is quite an engineering challenge.  Engineering is an entirely collaborative process, it involves many, many people, each doing their own part of the puzzle and then bringing all of it together.  So it’s a real team sport, and that environment is something that science, technology and engineering offers.”

Speaking about IT in her life, Julia says: “the IT journey over the last couple of decades has been absolutely phenomenal.  I remember at university we had a computing room which had communal computer facilities that were accessible for the postdocs and postgraduates, with shared email accounts.  … We had computing in the laboratories, but that was typically compute power for writing programs and operating systems, it wasn’t the personal compute capability that we are so used to today.”

In her role, she adds: “All of the systems that we created have compute power and processing power embodied within them. It’s been the widespread  affordability of it that has really powered the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution. The internet of things, AI, virtual reality, many things that we see around us today, and much of which we take for granted, has come from that huge availability of computational power and the data networks that go with it.

“Much of what we have would not be possible without the compute power revolution. If I look back over my arly career and my PhD in quantum physics, I could not have foreseen that winding the clock forward to today, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies would be on the lips of the Prime Minister, but they are. It’s because we’ve got the computational power and the ability to share data across  networks of scientists and researchers that is enabling this rapid pace of technological development. So, things that were a pipe dream a few decades ago, become reality today.”

Add that it’s not just the UK PM that is talking about these topics, it’s PMs across the world as each see the opportunity and indeed imperative to use technology to address major challenges such as health, climate and opportunities for growth, education alike.

In 2014, Julia became Head of Engineering for Training Services. “We were looking at creating training environments and particularly synthetic training environments, such as high-fidelity, virtual reality, simulators that would allow us to deliver training, including pilot training for specific aircraft and training maintainers to maintain those aircraft systems, etc, quite complex technical training.

If you think about previous generations and how training was delivered then, you can see that now there is far more training delivered in a really repeatable, tuneable way, in a simulation environment.  You can create contexts and environments that have high quality, high accuracy and are repeatable synthetic simulations of aircraft behaviour or subsystem behaviour, etc, that allows you to deliver training in quite a different way with precision and at the point of need.”

In developing these new ways of training, that covered everything from hand-held training devices, desk-top devices up to fully immersive, multi-million pound complex aircraft simulators, Julia worked with the engineering teams across the world. She explains: “Engineering is a really collaborative process, we worked with teams across the world, to understand what were the training needs, cultural differences, in the way training is delivered. We worked with a number of the Formula 1 teams to look at how they train racing drivers and how does that compare with how we train fast jet pilots, for example. There are lots of crossovers between different industrial sectors, or application sectors, so that was fascinating.”

Julia worked as Head of Engineering for Training Services for five years and then took the role of Chief Technologist for the Air Sector, a new role in the organisation and which she describes as “an absolutely brilliant job”.  She adds: “I had the privilege and the opportunity in that role to define the technology strategy across the  sectorial business which stretched from the UK, to Australia, the Middle East and other territories in which the company operated. It was at the time in the UK when the industrial strategy had just come out.  We started to see this emerging picture of digital technologies, AI, data science, and so it was a really brilliant time to bring that language into the broader  strategic narrative and start thinking about those partnerships and ecosystems that would need to be developed and how we would work with academia and industry to really drive forward in those areas.”

Asked about mentors and those who have influenced her career, Julia talks about many people who have influenced her career at various stages by offering insight, understanding and most of all encouragement. She says: “It would be really difficult to pinpoint one person.  I have been lucky in that I have gone out and sought people that could support me and I have always received encouragement and support from people that I’ve reached out to.  I think it’s great to have mentors, people to bounce ideas off outside of your day-to-day job.  I certainly think that’s been really useful.  I’ve gained a lot from being able to talk around topics with people outside my immediate work sphere and I would encourage people to do that.”

In talking about her career, Julia highlights the importance of being able to communicate well, she explains: “The person that manages your career is you.  There are so many opportunities out there, and if you can develop the confidence to communicate about yourself in a way that is authentic for you, then that’s always helpful and you’ll find that people are usually more than willing to support and guide.”

Julia says that although she did not have a specific career plan, she did have a clear understanding of the things that she enjoyed, adding: “and the things in which I felt I could add value and the balance that I wanted to have between different aspects of my life. I’ve always tried to maintain doing things that I thought were interesting, working in environments that I’ve enjoyed, because when you do that you get more out of it.  Finding what is right for you is something that is important.

 “I wanted to do science, I wanted to do engineering, that’s the sphere I wanted to be in. As a female as well, I’ve had a family as I’ve been working, and so being in an environment in which you are supported by your employer and being in a partnership where you support each other, has allowed me to maintain my career direction, whilst having a family. ”

After 26 years working for BAE, Julia decided to change direction when she saw an opportunity as the role of Chief Scientific Adviser in the Department for Business and Trade, for the UK government. She explains: “It was an opportunity that arose and the more I spoke to people about it, the more I thought this could be a really interesting challenge. I felt that the great experience and the learning that I’d gathered at BAE Systems would be a good springboard, an opportunity to add value in a different way, to use my industrial experience to support from within government.”

She says of the experience so far: “It’s been brilliant.  There are lots of people that are so dedicated to what they do, and everybody is working hard to try to do the right thing, it’s an amazing time to be a scientist or an engineer.  For the first time in my career, we’ve got the Prime Minister talking about the importance of science and technology, stressing how important it is that we are equipped with the appropriate STEM and STEAM capability, to really use technology to innovate, to create new business opportunities. It’s just a brilliant time to be into science, technology and engineering, because you’ve got government calling out for it, you’ve got industry wanting to invest and innovate, and you’ve got this global environment in which everybody’s on the same page. There are some significant challenges that face us, from health, to climate, education, biodiversity and inequality and so the opportunity to utilise technology and science, as part of the solution is a real imperative.”

 Julia is also passionate about encouraging more young women to study STEM subjects and pursue STEM careers, she explains: “At BAE Systems, I did a lot to support science, technology, engineering by being part of the Women into Engineering campaign and supporting speech nights with 16-year-olds, and females particularly, to grow the diversity, and for them to see living examples of females who have careers in science and engineering; that’s really important and I will continue to do that.

“We have to improve on diversity and inclusion because we have a shortage of scientists and technologists and engineers in the UK, and if we do not try our absolute hardest to encourage those elements of our society that might not feel it’s a natural place for them to go or a natural obvious choice in school, then we will forever have a dearth of science, technologists and engineers, we’ll be forever under-supplied in this area. But if we can embrace diversity and inclusion and actually articulate science and technology, engineering as an opportunity for everybody, then that’s going to go some distance to bridging the current gap that we have. We must do better.  We don’t have a choice.”

Through her career, Julia has had the opportunity to contribute to science and engineering through her role on multiple industrial advisory boards, councils and committees. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and was the UK industrial representative on NATO’s Science and Technology Board.  She says of the latter: “That was really fascinating and inspiring.  NATO published a new science and technology strategy in which they articulated how they needed to utilise science and technology to really generate the best possible capability across the NATO allies. As a large organisation, they are a macro-example of what corporates and governments are also thinking; we need to use science and technology now to make sure we’re at the forefront of product capability and business growth. So it was a great opportunity to work in a collaborative environment, with the member states, who are all at different levels of maturity in terms of science and technology, investment, and aspiration, but with a common thread running through the discussions, which was the importance of the technology revolution that we’re seeing.”

 Julia sees working with other organisations as “an opportunity to see science, technology and challenges from within a different sector to the one that you’re most familiar with.”  She adds: “Science and engineering is a massively collaborative  operation, the opportunity to learn quickly, to accelerate by sharing ideas and thoughts, is so important. Sharing ideas and thoughts with engineers and scientists from different sectors to the one that is your home sector is another source of inspiration and another great way to get those crossover ideas and innovation. The prospect of being able to translate your skills across multiple different sectors and corporations, should be an attractor for people coming into the space or considering science and technology A levels and degrees.”

Reflecting on the progress that the application of science and technology have made on society during her career, Julia says: “One of the biggest disruptors has been the advent of widespread, affordable compute and data with the ability to share quickly across large networks; this has produced this accelerating effect that we’re now seeing in certain branches of science.  Looking at AI, it feels as though we’re at a pivotal point in which if we can apply some of the technologies that a number of us have been maturing over the last number of decades, we could really transform industries and sectors and society.  You could envisage a health service that’s proactive because of its ability to predict from datasets, etc, and I sense potentially large societal changes coming because of the advent of some of the technologies that we’re seeing today.”

Asked if society needs to pause and reflect on artificial intelligence, Julia says: “I definitely do not advocate pausing.  I don’t think we should stop because I have no idea how you would make that work across the world, how you would enforce that, that seems an impossible thing to achieve.

“We do need to regulate and we need the brightest minds and the most careful and clever, thoughtful people from a number of different walks of life and sectors to try and understand what would be an appropriate regulatory framework.”

She highlights that the UK, US, EU and China are all already busy considering regulation, adding: “We do need regulation, but it’s going to be dependent on what’s the application, what’s the risk to society from different elements of it, and that’s going to vary. It is something that has galvanised a lot of opinion recently, and so if we can establish some international standard, that would be really helpful.”

“When you think about regulation you have to think about that whole scope and what it is you’re trying to achieve.  AI’s already pervasive, we use software in almost everything, so there is an element of software decision making that happens in most devices that we’re blissfully unaware of.  AI has provided some really good capability for us and it’s important not to stifle innovation. We need the right balance of regulation that is going to protect us from those things that we think could be harmful, but actually not stifle innovation and the rich vein of  discovery that we’ve got going on at the moment and the need for us to utilise AI to solve some of the genuine challenges that we have ahead.”

Speaking about the UK’s global standing in AI and our contribution to international regulation, Julia adds: “We have a very strong reputation in AI. The number of start-ups in the AI space is a huge number and we are seen as having a very vibrant AI community. We have a very strong academic record with four of the top ten universities in the UK.  Also, we are seen as having a very strong regulatory record, so on this particular challenge, we’re  seen as being a very competent voice.”

Reflecting on her career and her proudest achievements, Julia highlights several different aspects, saying: “The thing that I have most enjoyed in my profession is the opportunity to work with lots of really different people, clever people, all committed to what they do on a vast range of different problems and challenges.  That’s been fascinating, really enjoyable.  No two days have been the same.  The energy that you get from that variation has been really wonderful.

“The thing that I’m pleased that I have achieved when I look at my career, although I am not done yet, is that I am glad that I have been able to sample both the large-scale corporate, get an understanding of academia, and also have some understanding of the broader ecosystem through some of my engagements with small/medium-sized enterprises that I’ve been lucky enough to have over the years. Of course, I am now seeing those same challenges through the lens of government.

“I’ve also enjoyed being able to see technology at the laboratory stage and gain an understanding all of those things that need to line up to get it into service.  To go from technology to something that you can trade in a competitive global market requires all sorts of things to line up including technology readiness, skills, infrastructure, finance, risk appetite, supply chain, export and markets.

“I’m pleased that I’ve been able to sample work in a global context, working in the UK and in Australia. The inspiration and insights you get from working in a different culture, a different place, are fantastic.

“And most recently, working in government, has given me yet another perspective, a different setting, still trying to solve a number of the same challenges but with a different set of levers.

“That’s a really long way of saying I’ve enjoyed the variation within the science and technology lane. I’ve enjoyed that richness of challenges, of environments, of locations in which to  work.”

Offering advice to anyone considering a career in STEM, Julia says: “If you want to make a difference, if you want to see the world, if you want to work with lots of different people, if you want to address some challenges that are going to make a difference to society, then science, technology and engineering is a great career path for you.  There may be other career paths that also offer those challenges, but if you’re thinking about science and technology and engineering, it provides you with a landscape in which you can plot your own path, and that can be a global pathway, it can be through multiple different sectors.  There are huge opportunities.  There is a shortage of scientists, technologists and engineers at the moment, so if you are thinking of going into that space, you won’t be without demand.”

She adds: “Always be open-minded to different ways of doing things, different approaches and different  innovative solutions.”

 Julia also highlights the role of the many professional and learned societies that exist such as the Royal Academy of Engineering, the British Academy, the Royal Society, the Royal Aeronautical Society, and Institute of Electronics and Technologists, etc, in supporting science, technology and engineering.  She adds: “For younger people, if they’re baffled at where to go, you can always reach out to these other institutions which are only too happy to help, and are desperately seeking the voice of younger people, or those people that we don’t hear from enough within science, technology and engineering.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley