Richard III expert among engineers honoured in show

A professor who helped discover how Richard III died is among 50 people who have been photographed for an exhibition celebrating half a century of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Prof Sarah Hainsworth, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Durham University, will feature in the 50for50 exhibition at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford.

She helped to establish the injuries that led to Richard's death, after his skeleton was discovered under a council car park in Leicester in 2012.

The exhibition was commissioned by the Royal Academy of Engineering and is travelling to venues across the UK as part of its 50th anniversary.

Hainsworth, who was Born in Baildon and raised in Middleham, North Yorkshire, said the exhibition was a "fantastic opportunity to show to young people the diversity of engineering careers and what engineers do in reality".

She said: "I think when you look at it as an exhibition as a whole it just shows the breadth of the profession and the exciting things engineers work on."

She was included for her work as a materials and forensic engineer, studying what makes knives and other implements sharp and the forces involved in stabbing, as well as the tool marks left behind on bone.

"When the remains for Richard III were found under a car park in Leicester I got to look at the injuries to the skull, the ribs, the pelvis and to try and work with colleagues to determine what were the weapons that would have been used on the battlefield," she explained.

"That's the thing people really don't appreciate about engineering, they think we just do the same thing all the time but even if you've got a specialism the number of ways in which you can apply that specialism across engineering is really varied."

Taken by photojournalist Jude Vidal, from Harrogate, the photographs include some of the UK's most influential engineers.

Among them is Cath Noakes, Professor of Environmental Engineering for Buildings, at the University of Leeds.

Noakes said it was important to showcase the variety of work engineers do.

"My photo was actually taken during the pandemic because I did quite a lot of work on airborne transmission of infection and how we can manage that, which helped everybody with guidance during the pandemic," she said.

"People have this vision of an engineer as somebody who works with tools or works on a site somewhere, but it's so broad.

"You've got people working in biomedical, you've got people who are working more on computer models for how we predict the climate's going to affect flooding in cities."

Vidal said it had been inspiring to meet the engineers who were "genuinely good people trying to do good things all the time".

"Engineers are incredibly creative. You don't think of them as creative people, but you have to be creative to do the problem solving that they do," she said.

"There's a great mix of being incredibly creative and collaborative, but also the scientific edge you need to enable them to do the things they do."

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