TTE 2.03 Danielle George

Published: Feb. 8, 2021, 6 a.m.

­This episode is a conversation with Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) and Associate Vice President at the University of Manchester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Manchester (University of Manchester). She is a highly-respected scientist and was made Professor in 2014 at the age of 38. Danielle gave the 2014 Royal Institution lecture, at the time only the sixth woman to do so, she was given an MBE in 2016 and was awarded the Faraday Prize in 2018. She is currently the President of The Institution of Engineering and Technology, overseeing an international programme to celebrate the Institution’s 150th anniversary. If her work and plaudits sound daunting, they shouldn’t because Danielle also happens to be one of the nicest and most down-to-earth people I’ve had the pleasure of working with. With French physicist Christophe Galforth, Danielle co-presented a programme I filmed, which featured Stephen Hawking and his central idea that human beings need to become multi-planetary species in order to survive long-term. I was fortunate to get to know Danielle well during filming, which included camping on Norwegian snow fields and venturing to South American observatories, among other places. Aswell as being super intelligent, she is great fun with a fantastic sense of humour. In many ways, Danielle’s approach to science communication is perfectly captured by the Robot Orchestra project, which we touch on in our conversation. Unexpected, brilliant, fun and easy to engage with, the robot orchestra is very much like Danielle herself.