Sustainability Seminar Series | The Future of Science – Sustainability, Sociological Factors and Serendipity

KAUST Research Open Week Keynote Speaker: Professor Donal Bradley
Tuesday, November 30
9:00 AM
Auditorium, Building 20 and live on KAUST Official YouTube

Professor Donal Bradley, Vice President, Research, KAUST
The Future of Science – Serendipity, Sociological Factors and Sustainability

Abstract
The future of science and its contributions to global society have often been predicted but not with any great prescience, even when subsequently reimagined with 20:20 hindsight. In this talk KAUST's Vice President for Research, Donal Bradley, will discuss the importance of unpredictable factors in steering the true course of science and its consequences. In particular, human factors can play a big role through serendipity, group-think, and commercial and political pressures. Professor Bradley will illustrate his talk with examples from his own research, entrepreneurial and leisure activities in Display Technologies, Solar Energy Generation, Photonic Nanostructures, and Piscatorial Icthyology. He will also discuss some other, well-known, historical examples of these phenomena together, dangerously perhaps, with some crystal ball gazing on the sustainability of today's scientific endeavours.

Biography
Professor Donal Bradley joined KAUST in April 2019 and is tasked with fostering excellence in our research and supporting wide application of the resulting knowledge. Interdisciplinary and collaborative research bridging science and engineering to societal benefit is a strategic focus.
Before coming to KAUST, Donal Bradley was Head of the Division of Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences (Dean of Science and Engineering) at the University of Oxford. In that role he oversaw the activities of ten departments comprising 700 faculty, 2000 research and support staff and 5,500 students. He was also a Professor of Engineering Science and Physics, with an innovative and wide-ranging research programme in molecular electronic materials and devices both in Oxford and at OSCAR (the Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research) in China. Professor Bradley's research, conducted in Oxford, at Imperial College London and at the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, has attracted strong international recognition, including award of the EU Descartes Prize (2003), SID Jan Rajchman Prize (2005), ESF European Latsis Prize (2005), IOP Faraday Medal (2009), IET Faraday Medal (2010), RS Bakerian Medal (2010), Jiangsu Governor's Prize (2016) and, most recently, the E-MRS Jan Czochralski Award (2019). His publications have been cited > 82,000 times with h-index = 126 (Google Scholar) and he is a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher; he is also a named inventor on > 25 patent families. He also holds honorary doctorates from the University of Sheffield (2014) and Hong Kong Baptist University (2017) and is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge.
Professor Bradley has been a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) since 2004 and was appointed a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2010 for services to science. He is a co-inventor of conjugated polymer electroluminescence (1989) and a co-founder of Cambridge Display Technology Ltd (1990), now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sumitomo Chemical Company. In 2001 he co-founded Molecular Vision Ltd to develop novel polymer detection systems for microanalysis applications, subsequently acquired by the Abingdon Health Group. Professor Bradley also served on the Board of Solar Press (UK) Ltd (2009-16) and supported CSEM Brasil in establishing Sunew, companies set up to develop roll-to-roll printed solar cells. He currently serves on the Board of Oxford Advanced Research Centers Ltd.

Find out more about KAUST Research Open Week on our website.
Brought to you by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Students for Sustainability

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