Interview with Professor Jim McLaughlin OBE

Professor Jim McLaughlin OBE was born in 1960, in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. His father was a draughtsman and part-time architect working as a civil servant in the planning office. Jim’s mother also worked as a civil servant before Jim was born and then returned to work when Jim was fourteen when the rules about married women with children were changed. Jim is the eldest of three children, with a younger brother and sister.

Jim says: “I suppose they had the job of raising us.  There was no TV or central heating in the house in the 1960s.” Jim was fascinated by the radio in the living room with its valves and ‘bass sound’ which was the family’s evening entertainment. Jim was aged eleven when the family bought a TV. Until then, the family, like many others in the area, went to the golf club to watch football on TV.

Jim says of his father: “He was a very creative man, an artist in his own part-time way, and as a part-time architect he designed houses.  I helped him and I think there was an expectancy I would go into architecture.  It was quite interesting actually in those days there was no CAD, so my dad would take me with him to measure up a house.  Those sketches were then converted into a drawing, and then eventually a drawing was converted into a plan.” The process of converting the drawing into a plan was manual and Jim says: “When I understood it, it actually influenced me quite a bit in life.  It was like a photolithography type process.  It was a process basically where you are taking tracing paper with the black ink on it, exposing it to UV light, photosensitive paper in behind it, and you start to produce the plans like that.  The plans were then taken out, and with paintbrushes the whole family got involved in colouring in the different sections of the house. That whole process of doing plans, being creative with them, being very methodical in your approach of actually planning out a process of designing an extension, or a new house, or whatever it might be, impressed me.”

The family were in the minority, religion wise,  in Ulster during the Troubles of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Jim says: “ being in the minority was difficult, it was difficult in the workplace obviously for my father and mother.  We’re not from an extreme part of the country, Portstewart wouldn’t claim to have had its share of the Troubles.  We did have a few bombs going off.  Tension was in the air.  I do remember pre-Troubles. I remember society being very, very, free and open, but it was what was happening in the workplace, what was happening with housing, where the civil rights issues developed.”

The family did have discussions as to whether it was a good place to bring up the family. Jim says: “While the Troubles were a constant cause of tension, the strange thing about Northern Ireland is that it’s still a beautiful place to live. During the Troubles there was a resilience and a community feel that you probably don’t get in many other parts of the world, or in other parts of the UK itself.”

Jim and his siblings were encouraged by their parents to get a good education in order to get good jobs. They all went to local schools which were literally a few hundred yards from the family home. Jim gained ten O Levels and three A Levels at the Dominican College. Jim says:  “It was a beautiful school. It’s an old castle perched right above the town of Portstewart overlooking a two-mile sandy beach, swimming pools, the wild Atlantic Ocean and the beautiful Donegal mountains.”

While at school Jim played for the school football and golf teams. He was interested in the sciences and maths, less keen on arts. He learned to play piano and the trombone and took part in school plays. He adds; “My passion really was physics, chemistry, maths which probably goes back to that wireless system in the house.”

In 1979, after leaving school, Jim joined the Michelin tyre company as a trainee product process manager. He says: “That was an interesting year.  Margaret Thatcher was very passionate about people going and getting a job, even apprentice jobs, and less worried about the university scene. There was a big push to actually go and get jobs.  Secondly, there was a lot of big opportunities and new thinking in these types of modern companies. In those days Michelin was, and still is, a very progressive company; a company that wanted to do something very different with its product, and therefore wanted to do something different with people that it took to train in a very particular way. The concept was to be very knowledgeable about the whole company and understand the process from beginning to end, something that was not permitted due to company confidentiality.  This was unique thinking from a Michelin point of view.”

After a two day interview which they conducted on site, Jim was offered a job with a salary of £5,500 a year, his father was on £4,000 a year. He adds: “Five and a half thousand pound a year to an eighteen-year-old was unheard of.  I also applied to Plessey and a few other companies at that stage, and managed to get the interview, so I became quite confident with this idea that I could get an interview whenever and I didn’t need university. I was happy enough to progress that route.”

While working at Michelin, Jim says he was taught French, taught about innovation, process engineering which was heavily materials-orientated, production engineering, and lean manufacturing. He adds: “It was a very unusual management company, you were psychoanalysed every week. Industrial psychologists watched your behaviour, your attitude and your leadership quality. They were very good to me in that they helped me a lot with the leadership piece, the idea of being able to communicate your ideas in a minute, get your documents for report writing across to senior management, the whole idea of managing financial cases that you’re making for the company.  That stood me well for the rest of my life because I knew how industry ticked, I knew what industry wanted, I knew how it worked. Later in life that became so important to me. I would tell anybody, if you ever do get an opportunity, that’s the type of pathway that you should follow.”

However, after working for a couple of years, Jim realised that industry was not as ‘stable’ as he hoped. The sandwich degree course which he had been due to join through Michelin was postponed for a year. He explains: “Michelin were downsizing and moving us around the world to different places. I felt that instability in the company, even though the process engineering job taught me a lot, it was very specific to the company. The safety net of a degree wasn’t there, so I decided to go back and do a degree.”

Jim chose to go to the University of Ulster over Manchester, in order to stay local after his father died at an early age. He explains: “I went to University of Ulster which was four miles up the road in those days at the Coleraine campus, to do applied physics. It was supposed to be a temporary position for a year until we got over the death of my father, but I liked it so much that I decided to stay and I completed the degree there.”

After completing his degree he elected to remain at university to do research and a PhD, with much support from my wife Gemma, in thin film and flat panel display following on from his final year project on surface plasmon resonance under Professor George Walmsley.

He explains: “When I looked for a job straight after my degree, I applied to the University of Ulster campus at Jordanstown, where Professor John Anderson was offering a two-year research job in thin film electroluminescent display.”

Jim says: “John worked quite closely with Professor Pantridge to develop the world’s first portable defibrillator. John was the senior engineer and the innovator behind that portable defibrillator.  The portable defibrillator of 1966 was trialled and modified right up to 1973/’74, before it was properly used. It consisted of a handful of logic devices that basically measured impedance, another one that measured arrhythmias et cetera, and tried to portray the results on a flat panel display, which was a still a fragile cathode ray tube -CRT. It wasn’t really portable. These displays were breaking all the time. John realised that this portable defibrillator wasn’t really suitable for ambulances, so, he decided to get some research going in Northern Ireland on proper flat panel display systems that were different to liquid crystal or anything else that was coming through, that had to emit light properly so that you could see them in all sorts of conditions, in sunlight et cetera. He asked me to start working on zinc sulphide and thin film zinc sulphide electroluminescent displays.”

Jim says that he took the job as a temporary opportunity as his heart was not into going into Belfast in the middle of the Troubles. He hoped to return to work with George Walmsley if he could get funding for his project.  However, every time he thought about leaving, he says: “John came up with more money, better ideas, and big industry links. We picked up money and grant funding easily from American companies in particular, in those days.” The funding allowed the team to buy equipment and Jim to hand-build a clean room.

Within two years John and Jim set up a bioengineering centre offering a biomedical degree within the School of Engineering to sustain their work. John adds: “Establishing a thin film laboratory with some characterisation equipment, mainly focusing on electronic and medical devices, really opened the door for so many things after that that lead to a whole history of innovation that started to happen.”

Around the age of fourteen, Jim owned his first computer; a ZX81, moving onto a Spectrum.  He says: “I bought magazines and copied the code into the computer effectively to get different things working, for example, a game, a betting system for racing horses, control systems for some of the lights or systems in our house etc. I was big into sound systems and audio systems, so I found that I could do quite wonderful things with audio systems by controlling pulses and phases to the audio system. I created a whole room mood system. I set up a ghost train system in our garage at home and charged people to go into it. Part of it was these really strange sounds that would come out of these audio systems.”

“I’m not big into programming. We did FORTRAN at university as well as machine code.  I don’t mind tweaking at the edges of a program, but it wouldn’t be my big thing.  My background in physics means I’m a lot more interested in all the fringes around what a program actually does.”

Jim does not believe that AI will eventually take over from humans, he says: “There is obviously a lot of emphasis now on the ethics of AI et cetera. AI is there to help, it’s an enabler and a tool.  … There’s, probably a fear that it might perform better than a human at many tasks, which although true that does not mean that humans will lose control as we understand the importance of controlling for human and societal benefits.  It could be argued in the area of clinical diagnostics, if a clinician has to make a decision, and there’s quite a few parameters that just a basic computing system fed the right data, will probably get a better and faster result than the clinician.  Now the clinician may of course be able to bring something extra, but as time goes on we’ll learn from our lessons, build a better system, more robust diagnostic system, and it’ll eventually get to a point that it’s better than an average clinician at making that decision.  However, clinicians have another role and it’s the compassion and therapy piece, the whole issue of what do you do next, the proper referral and whats best for the individual patient.  I think that’s going to be the role of the clinician, that smart piece of actually knowing how to deal with situations and people and their emotions, their mentality et cetera, how they progress on.”

Jim concludes: “I think the consensus will be that there’ll always have to be that level of control … it’s too dangerous and wrong to allow it to be the absolute system that takes over from humans in every area that we need.”

Jim says that he learned a lot about how to balance the many roles of doing research, teaching, management and presentations from working with John Anderson. Adding; “The man went on to develop a range of new defibrillators and manage companies et cetera.  I did some of that jointly with him. At the same time he was an absolute born leader, so I watched very closely.”

Jim now has a team working with him and adds: “I think there’s times in life, particularly in a professorial role, that you have to be light on your feet in certain areas, in other areas you have to dive deep and actually fully understand.”

As well as his research, Jim also manages the School of Engineering, a role he will step down from in the next six months. Under his watch, the school has grown from 28 to 45 members of staff and covers electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineering.

He has also been involved in setting up spin-out companies with John and on his own. He adds: “Once you do that and you’ve been involved in boardrooms and all the CTO, CEO issues, raising of funding, selling off and exiting, there is a little guilt feeling that comes in to many academics.  There’s always a desire to put that knowledge back in to the university, the students, or the staff, and try and inspire the next generation to do that, so, I always keep my hand in on teaching.”

He says of students, “They want the basics.  Give them the basics but apply it and keep the students interested …  You have to make sure you think like a student and in the way that they want.  A lot of that comes from experience that some of us will have. I took on being Head of the School to see if I could create better leadership skills within the staff of the school. I feel that some of that’s coming through now and maturing quite nicely, and I see more potential leaders in the school than probably I’ve ever seen before.”

Jim believes that today’s students have the opportunity to learn more transferable skills, are more digital aware across all of the engineering subjects and are more open to innovation and leadership. He adds: “When I was growing up, I wouldn’t say innovation and entrepreneurship were a great word.  It was deemed that if you had nothing else to do you might do that, or if you felt lucky you might do that, but now it’s encouraged.”

One aspect that worries him is the potential for students to be ‘spoiled by the digital world’ where actual understanding of graphs and statistics, for example, can be lacking because technology can do the work for them. He adds: “It’s actually something in engineering we do try to address currently, with other electronic tools, but again, students find easy ways round electronic tools to press buttons and get the result that they want anyway.  That is just a real worrying issue.” Jim says that university and academics have also had to learn to be more responsive to students who expect feedback much more quickly and expect to be hand-fed a lot more these days. He is keen to see problem solving, teamwork, lateral thinking, innovation and communication skills all improved.

For Jim, communication is the most important element of management. He says: “Keep communicating so that you keep people included.  That inclusion piece is absolutely core, through all the various levels of staff. …. Simple messages are my style, so that everybody knows the mantra, and that everything fits in within that.  At Dominican College, I suppose one of the big things was ‘do the right thing’, veritas, do it with truth. Very often you’ve a decision to make and you have to turn to your core values, you have to turn to help from an executive team, and the decision that you make though is do whatever is the right thing and don’t get it clouded with anything else that might be political, financial, or whatever.  Do what’s right to that person, or do what’s right for the school.”

Empowering people is the other aspect of management that Jim believes is important.  He adds: “When I speak to anybody, I tell them to go off and do it themselves, and make sure they keep me informed, but at the same time, it’s their thing, make it happen, and do it so that you don’t create barriers, you don’t create difficulties but provide opportunities and inclusion.”

Of being the holder of 30 patents, Jim says: “Strangely enough, the patent that started everything , goes back to the flat panel display work that I was working on. We had a problem with edge connectors, and I had read about a screen-printing method for putting silver inks on the edge of tin oxide on glass for flat panel display applications.  As I was sitting wondering about screen printing, serendipity played its part and my sister called me to ask if I could help her in the art college with some graphic design screen printing.  I met the technician who explained the whole process of screen printing, preparing a screen and photolithography.” After this, Jim and the technician begin experimenting with the precision printing that Jim was interested in.  Jim continues: “I got a tenth of an inch pitch printing on the screen-printing system, and I took it out to work and tried it. It worked a treat on the flat panel display work.”

Back in the lab, Jim bought a high-precision screen printer and got the work going to the flat panel display work. He asked a colleague who was working on medical electrodes, if he could try printing what he was doing on polyester. He says: “I got some of these special silver inks formulated, tried screen printing it.  Bingo, it worked. It was one of these eureka moments, when we did the impedance analysis, and then did ECG analysis, and it just all worked an absolute treat.”

Jim, John and a colleague patented the design and were approached by a company called Ludlow who wanted to license it from them. Jim adds: “We did a licence deal with them, and Ludlow ended up producing the largest selling ECG electrode in the world from that patent, using that technique, selling and licensing it, further licensing it out to HP, Philips, Spacelabs, and many other medical companies around the world.”

He continues: “So even though it was a very simple design patent, there was a bit of science behind what we were doing, but there was a lot of serendipity. Strangely, that screen printing technology was the basis for Heartsine which now employs 270 people making defibrillators after being bought over by Stryker. Defibrillator pads are all screen printed, and without that, you wouldn’t have had some of the uniqueness that was required.  It was the basis behind Intelesens and Heartscape, all companies that have done very, very, well for us.  So, that bit of serendipity in those early days, the fact that we had a multidisciplinary lab, was absolutely core.”

Jim says of the opportunity offered by European IT research, “I think Europe has so much potential; it’s got some magnificent world class laboratories. We can’t be overly critical of Europe when you think of innovation in the UK, and some of the great innovation that’s come out over the years, the great people that have brought it forward, and some of the influential developments. But we don’t have quite what Asia maybe has matured as regards some of the major manufacturing companies.”

Looking to the US, and what they have done right in this regard, Jim says: “They’ve worked very closely with Asia at getting manufacturing and getting the business piece right. Europe’s not quite sure of its identity in that area, what it really, really wants to do, certainly in relation to healthcare technology and electronics.”

He points to difference in funding, adding: “Another important bit is the way you fund research and innovation through to scale-up to manufacture.  In America there are particular funding schemes that have worked extremely well, and we don’t seem to have taken them on board in Europe.

“These are innovation programmes that look very intelligently at the concept and the innovation and the patents. They allow the organisations that are bringing forward these ideas to move at pace through the various technology readiness levels (TRL), without them having to worry all the time about funding.  Normally spin-out companies get two or three months before you have to worry about where the next money’s coming from, and you spend all your time concerned about that financial piece, the business piece, hiring and all the rest of it right, but you don’t get to the kernel of what has to be done to make both your project work, how to scale it up, and how to build partnerships properly to actually do that. These projects in America are totally focused on that scale-up piece and getting it to market and getting it right. After that, the big funding is available, the trust is there, and that culture is there to make that work.  If there’s a failure in there, that culture is there to still move on.

“I think Asia has adopted that. There is a work ethic in many countries in Asia, that  even if it doesn’t work they’ll get it to work. …. Whilst we in Europe we have all the opportunities for doing that, but we don’t seem to just get that together to the same extent.”

Jim says of his mistakes; “There’s probably lots of small ones as you go along. I always look back at how long it took for some of our spin-out companies to mature; fifteen years for Intelesens, HeartSine seventeen or eighteen years.

“What is it in the system or the set-up of those companies that take so long, and we do things maybe with this iterative role without user feedback at the right time.  Maybe researchers and academics don’t want expose their concept or proto-type to anybody until it’s complete, while you should be demonstrating it to anyone who is a user, with valuable input into the concept at the very early stages thus co-developing it properly.”

To address this issue, Jim is just about to launch a new £43 million Centre for Digital Healthcare Technology; a Belfast Region City Deal project.  It will feature a clinical living lab and a community living lab which will allow researchers to co-ideate projects alongside clinicians. Jim explains: “They will be able to continuously iterate via a  feedback system to us, and tell us that this is not a project worth working on, or you need to accelerate this project immediately. They’ll also be able to involve clinical trial patients.”

He adds: “Serendipity, networking, and all sorts of qualities start to appear once you work closely with the user and the end user particularly. You get your UX piece perfect if you do that but you won’t come close to getting it right. I have made mistakes at not involving people early enough in the process.”

Asked what we might expect of technology in the medical sector in the next five years, Jim says: “One of the, the big dreams would be personalised medicine, but, that’s becoming a little bit difficult to realise in a five year timeframe.  For the next five years, we have to be realistic. This is what we call healthcare 4.0 revolution, which is trying to digitise the healthcare system, there’s been more troubles than everybody has imagined because of patient data security and patient data issues.”

As an example, Jim highlights the difficulties of home-based diagnostics that the medical sector has seen during the pandemic. He points to the hope that there was for individuals to be able to do home based antibody and antigen tests, and possibly self-diagnose via an app which would then provide a passport depending on outcomes. He adds: “We’ve had that concept around from XPRIZE TriCorder days, for about the last five years and trying to get that concept for other pandemics such as SARS right. With COVID, I think it was around 14th or 15^th of March that we put up on the website an app and diagnostic systems that would do all of that. But, what’s needed by the digital engineering world, not just academia, but in industry as well, is trust from the regulatory bodies, MHRA, FDA, CE et cetera. Trust that digital can fit into a system where both clinicians will totally trust the technology to help make decisions, and that hospitals and patients will benefit.  There are multiple issues that slow innovation down, and that’s what the UK Government have promised to improve in their most recent spending review; they’ll spend the money on trying to get productivity in the innovation process right.”

Jim points to the success in continually monitoring diabetes through a microneedle that’s worn for fourteen days and feeds data back to the patient. He says: “That’s been a life changer because of its ability to continuously monitor.  We have the same sort of technology coming through in other areas. Cardiac monitoring is another opportunity where people want to continuously measure, for example, atrial fibrillation (AF) is a big worry in later life, it’s associated with heart failure and stroke, so, people will want to eventually measure that condition on an ongoing basis, if it’s getting worse, or better, depending on how you’re being medicated. This relieve anxiety when you can actually do proper monitoring pieces and that because it’s becoming more and more difficult to call on a doctor.”

He concludes: “What I would hope you will see in the future is the concept of clinically relevant diagnostic kits coming to the home enabling self-management of your own health, using electronic devices to record that information so that it’s a backup to electronic care record systems. Electronics, in fact the smartphone, has a lot to offer the medical world. There’s a CMOS camera that we can do a lot of image analysis with; eyes, fingers, et cetera.  Analysis and AI gives us early warning systems, predictive analysis systems et cetera. The processing power, the miniaturisation of those CMOS imaging sensors are all adding up now to a platform that really allows us to move forward.”

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Hutton

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley