In Celebration of International Women’s Day 2017 – “Inspiration and Innovation in STEM”

Val Gibson is the Head of the High Energy Physics Research Group in the Cavendish. She holds a Special Honours BSc in Physics from the University of Sheffield (1983) and a DPhil in Experimental Particle Physics (1986), The Queen’s College, Oxford. She was a Fellow in the Experimental Physics Division at CERN (1987-89) and came to Cambridge in 1989 as an SERC Advanced Fellow, held concurrently with the Stokes Senior Research Fellowship at Pembroke College (1989-1994). She was appointed as University Lecturer and Fellow of Trinity College in 1994, Reader in 2006, held a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Fellowship (2007-08) and became a Professor in 2009.

Clare graduated from Trinity with a mathematics degree in 1986. Following a brief stint in computer graphics at The Independent newspaper she joined a small engineering firm in 1989 and has never looked back. She now leads the European arm of the Cities initiative for global engineering, management and development consultancy, Mott MacDonald, and is working with some of Europe’s highest profile cities.  Her role involves using systemic engineering at both building and city scale to facilitate the accommodation of more people in urban areas whilst consuming less resources, improving resilience and achieving enhanced quality of life. She brings a practical understanding of construction and development drivers and processes at both macro and micro level. Combining this with engagement at policy level she is able to bring insight into the technical, political, financial and behavioural aspects of sustainable development. Her role is to help stakeholders understand the influences of future disrupters (such as climate change or Big Data) and then apply ingenuity, innovation and connected thinking to find integrated solutions and resilient outcomes. Clare is also chair of the Mott MacDonald Advance network, an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiative, which has received industry acclaim in the three years since it was launched including being named winner of the Best Diversity and Inclusion Initiative award at the 2016 Construction Investing in Talent Awards . Clare says of her background in maths “It gives me the freedom to think from first principles and not be constrained by precedent; my colleagues used to laugh at how much I asked ‘why?’ but I’ve learned the value of my  need to find patterns, be they patterns in engineering principle or patterns in behaviour.”