Liz travels full circle
Mon, 24 Jun 2013 15:20:00 BST
Award-winning professor goes back to her research roots
Professor Liz Towns-Andrews is pictured at her lecture with the University's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bob Cryan.
Colleagues, peers, family and friends attended the inaugural professorial lecture of Liz Towns-Andrews, one of the University’s most successful professors.
The lecture, Travelling full circle: a crystallographer’s journey, was both engaging and heartfelt by the woman that was recently awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion and who is the current 3M Professor of Innovation – the only 3M-branded professorial chair outside of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Professor Towns-Andrews was the inspiration behind the University’s £12 million 3M Buckley Innovation Centre, which was officially opened in May by His Royal Highness The Duke of York (pictured). The state-of-the-art facility offers office, research and conference facilities to businesses that range from large corporations to ambitious start-up companies.
Her foresight and imagination to become a university closely engaged with business and one which fosters enterprise and innovation was rewarded when the University became the 2012 Entrepreneurial University of the Year.
Professor Towns-Andrews’s career has been as remarkable as it has been successful and it was this career journey that she used as the basis for her lecture – from research scientist to a specialist in enterprise, innovation and in business engagement between universities and industry.
It was this role that brought her to Huddersfield when she took up her post as Director of Research and Enterprise in 2009, having been Director of Knowledge Exchange for the Science and Technology Facilities Council.
In the course of her four years in Huddersfield, the University, through her effort and determination, has forged close relationships with a wide range of important companies, many of which have a global presence.
Although she is now the CEO for the Innovation Centre, Professor Towns-Andrews also stayed true to her original calling. Recently, she has begun to re-engage with her roots as a scientist, combining her enterprise role with collaboration on scientific research alongside some of her colleagues at the University.
“I have never lost my passion for science and I have taken it with me into my new career,” she says. “Technology is really important for companies going forward. They must be able to take ideas and new intellectual property through to end-users and markets and need the know-how to exploit them and solve problems.”
