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Inventive Podcast Episode 11

Jack Haworth – Electrical Engineer working with robots at Sellafield Ltd.


How can be robots be used in extreme environments? Electrical engineer Jack Haworth tells Trevor Cox how robots go where humans can’t at the UK’s Sellafield nuclear site and award-winning poet Katrina Porteous explores the relationship between humans and machines.

Inventive Podcast is all about mixing fact and fiction, featuring groundbreaking engineers and award-winning writers. This episode features sublime new poetry from Katrina Porteous interwoven with presenter Trevor Cox‘s interview with electrical engineer Jack Haworth.

When he was at school, Jack thought he was going to university to study business and become the next Alan Sugar. Instead, he took the long road into engineering. He’s working with robots collecting valuable information in the decommissioning of Sellafield. He tells Trevor what made him change career path and what attracted him to the nuclear industry.

Poet Katrina Porteous has worked with scientists for many years and believes the distinction between the arts and sciences is an unhelpful one. For engineers and artists alike, it’s all about imagining new worlds.

Katrina’s reading of her poem is interwoven throughout the episode and explores data-driven systems’ impact on society and the possibilities for interaction between human consciousness and machine learning.

Put your headphones on and take some time out to listen to this episode. Thanks to Adam at Overtone Productions, we’re bringing you outstanding sound design in the final episode of this series.

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Inventive Podcast Episode 10

Larissa Suzuki – Head of Data and AI/Machine Learning at Google


A fascinating insight into the Interplanetary Internet and AI in our cities of the future.

Larissa Suzuki is a polymath – she’s a computer scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, writer, inventor, and philanthropist. She was awarded the Engineer of the Year at the Engineering Talent Awards 2021 and the Royal Engineering Society’s Rooke Award and she made The Women Engineering Society’s Top 50 Women in Engineering.

She has one foot in academia and the other in industry – she’s an Honorary Associate Professor at University College London and a Data Scientist at Google working on Artificial Intelligence for Smart Cities and the Interplanetary Internet – that involves connecting devices and satellites to ensure we have connectivity to provide services to the international space station and remote planets.

Larissa is autistic and she tells Trevor Cox that it’s important that companies hire people who don’t fit a particular profile as that’s not the way to create better products and be more successful. She’s an advocate for women in STEM. The pioneering computer scientists were women, so why were they not given credit for their achievements?

Trevor and Larissa delve deep into the ethics of collecting data on citizens for smart cities. Should we be even more concerned about our privacy in the future?

Author Tim Maughan‘s short story, My City is Not a Problem, focuses on the first AI system built for the public sector. It appears to know how to solve London’s problems better than its politicians.

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Inventive Podcast Episode 9

Enass Abo-Hamed and Manjot Chana – The future of energy is hydrogen

How can we create carbon-free energy? The future of energy is hydrogen. As Glasgow hosts the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference, engineer and activist Enass Abo-Hamed and systems integration engineer Manjot Chana from renewable energy company H2GO chat to Trevor Cox about their groundbreaking plans to help save the planet.

The carbon we produce in heavy industries, aviation and energy supply emits pollutants. 1.2 billion people in the world don’t have control over energy supplies – they can’t get it at the flick of a switch.

Chemical engineer Enass from Palestine is as much an activist as she is an entrepreneur. She is passionate about raising awareness of the problems associated with climate change and set up her company H2GO to provide a solution. Enass explains her vision to Trevor Cox – to store renewable energy as low-cost hydrogen with zero emissions.

Manjot began his career as an apprentice engineer with Jaguar. He tells Trevor how his desire to change people’s lives for the better led him to switch to a career in renewable energy – and it turns out the skills he learned in the car industry are transferrable.

We mix fact and fiction in Inventive and in this edition, writer George Sandifer-Smith‘s short story highlights one of the biggest challenges in the climate change movement – people. There’s conflict when engineers are sent to repair green energy boxes smashed by conspiracy theorists.

A must-listen for everyone concerned about the planet, especially the leaders attending COP26. The future of energy is hydrogen!

H2GO – https://www.h2gopower.com/

Enass Abo-Hamed – linkedin.com/in/enassa

Manjot Chana – linkedin.com/in/manjot-chana

George Sandifer-Smith – linkedin.com/in/dr-george-sandifer-smith-phd-78830319b

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Inventive Podcast Episode 8

Josh Macabuag

The second episode in Series 2 of Inventive Podcast is an exciting insight into a profession we only get a glimpse of in news reports, through the eyes of an engineer who wants to make a positive impact on the world.


Disaster Risk Engineer Josh Macabuag has been at the scene of major natural disasters around the world. He was part of the SARAID (Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters) relief team in Japan in 2011, the earthquake in Nepal in 2015 and most recently the earthquake in Haiti 2021. As a volunteer with SARAID, he has to find the least dangerous way of getting people out of collapsed buildings, making on-the-spot decisions relying on his intuition. His day job involves quantifying the risks and costs of catastrophes for The World Bank. Josh was the first person in his family to go to university, studying engineering at Oxford. He counts his dad, a car mechanic, as one of his major influences. A humanitarian and engineer, Josh tells his remarkable story to presenter Trevor Cox.

If you listened to our first series – if not, you can listen to previous episodes below – you’ll know that we mix science and the arts by asking writers to create works inspired by the engineers’ stories. Writer Nina Allen, a winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award, is included in The Guardian’s 2018 list of ‘Fresh voices: 50 writers you should read now’. We asked Nina to write a short story based on Josh’s interview with Trevor. On the process of writing her story, ‘Forces and Loads’, Nina says, ‘It was the most engaging and inspirational, most unusual participation that I’ve ever experienced’. Her sinister story uncovers more than people trapped in the rubble of an earthquake.