Alumni Profile: Helen Atkinson

Helen Atkinson née Bavister (Natural Sciences, 1978)

By Pippa Considine (Law/English, 1985)

Professor Dame Helen Atkinson is wearing bright yellows and reds when I meet her on Zoom. She’s found herself a space in a room with empty desks to speak to me through her laptop, after delivering a hybrid presentation (live and online) at Cranfield University, where she is Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the School of Aerospace, Transport Systems and Manufacturing. If there is such a thing as a digital aura, hers is one of enthusiasm and wisdom.

When she received her damehood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2021, it was for services to engineering and education. These twin passions were fuelled at university. ‘I feel that I owe a huge amount of who I am today to the experience I had at Girton.’

In the Buckingham Palace citation she is described as ‘one of the UK’s foremost engineering leaders’. She says, with self-deprecating charm, that the honour was ‘a delightful surprise’. ‘Dame’ is a title that, in her case, crowns a story of grit and determination, driven by a zest for life. ‘For someone from my background, with both parents leaving school at 16, and as the first in my family to go to university, it is a most amazing thing.’

It was a rare moment for Helen’s girls’ grammar school, when the maths and science-loving sixth-former was invited for an interview at Cambridge. Her headmistress warned her that other candidates might seem more confident, but she should ignore this and just be herself. Interviewed by the late Dr Christine McKie, then Director of Studies in Physical Sciences, Helen had not aced her subject entrance papers, but she shone on the general paper and the College offered her a place. ‘I think one of the things that Girton is—and was—really good at, is spotting people with potential from less traditional backgrounds,’ she says. ‘I could see a number of fellow Girtonians in my year, where the College had seen the potential and enabled us to have an absolutely brilliant foundation.

‘Cambridge gave me confidence. It was very challenging and I flourished in that environment, partly because of the intellectual framework, but also because I was with a group of fellow students at Girton, from state schools, who all had high ambition.’ In the physics labs there were roughly ten women and more than 100 men. She remembers that when she and her fellow Girtonians didn’t understand something, they would keep asking. ‘We learnt, because we were prepared to admit that we didn’t understand, we plugged away and then—eventually— you’d get the light-bulb moment. We were very determined, persistent and mutually supportive as a group.’

Starting out as a Natural Scientist in 1978, the last year before the College turned co-educational, she remembers the change in tempo and practical changes when half of the new intake were men. The baths on her corridor became decorously separated by panels, so a third-year woman could be chatting with a first-year man in the next-door cubicle. ‘As the last all-girls year, we had such a fantastic time. When the men joined, they did bring a different dimension.’ She laughingly remembers one of them introducing a sheep, from the nearby field, into the corridor.

Between her Part I and Part II, the Tripos system at Cambridge had allowed her to change emphasis from Physics to Metallurgy and Materials Science. ‘You look down a microscope and see these amazing shapes and colours—and they all mean something. It is aesthetically stunning. The strength of a metal is determined by the shape of the crystals and how they fit together, and how the metal structure behaves when it is stressed is all determined by this fundamental microstructure. I found that fascinating.’

Inspired by her new focus, she graduated from Girton with a First and went on to complete a PhD at Imperial College, working with the Harwell Atomic Energy Authority in Oxfordshire, ‘surrounded by fantastic scientists and engineers’.

It was after this that she ‘accidentally’ became an educationalist. In her mid-twenties, she and her clergyman husband, Richard, decided to move to a tough parish. They went to live in the heart of a council estate in Sheffield, with more than its fair share of arson and anti-social behaviour. Here, Helen ‘threw herself on the job market’, finding work at Sheffield Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University), and then at Sheffield University; roles that allowed her time to care for their three young children. Sheffield was ahead of the curve with flexible employment and she was one of the first academics to be promoted to Senior Lecturer and then to Reader as a part-timer.

Her husband’s work then took him to Leicester and she found a post at Leicester University, becoming a Professor (still part-time) and then full-time Head of the Department of Engineering and subsequently Graduate Dean for the whole University.

Atkinson’s career in academia might have started with a chance event, but it’s her natural home. ‘In fact, if you cut me through, you’d find someone who is deeply academic by nature.’ Her current role at Cranfield, with its status as a postgraduate public research university specialising in science, engineering, design, technology and management, has involved important work with industry, including projects involving the future of aviation and sustainable manufacturing. To do this she has built relationships with manufacturers, including Rolls Royce and BAE Systems. The citation for her recent damehood focuses on this work: ‘She has made a tremendous impact in this role, cultivating key strategic partnerships with major industrial companies.’

Helen has been a role model for women in STEM. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the highest honour for an engineer in the UK; when she was elected in 2007, she was one of 29 women fellows, alongside 1400 men. She was the first woman President at the Engineering Professors’ Council, which represents engineering in higher education throughout the UK.

There is still work to be done to bring more women into the profession. ‘The dial has shifted only a bit since I was at Cambridge in the late 1970s and early 1980s,’ says Helen. ‘The number of professional engineers that are women was between 5 and 10 per cent. Now it’s closer to 15 per cent.’

Atkinson chairs the Royal Academy of Engineering’s multi-million pound ‘This is Engineering’ project, a social media campaign sponsored by a series of major industrial partners, which aims to encourage more young people to consider engineering as a career. The tailored content, with short films profiling an array of engineers, targets children before they make A level choices. Three years into this long-term initiative, the content has had over 50 million hits by young people with an almost equal split between girls and boys.

Educating people to be engineers, but also instilling confidence in their abilities, are uppermost priorities for Helen. ‘I believe absolutely passionately in the power of education’, she says. ‘You expand your mind through being challenged.

‘I fundamentally owe my career to the way I was stretched at Girton and Cambridge and I strongly believe in the concept of giving people the potential to flourish.

‘Certainly, I have made financial contributions to Girton and friends from my cohort have done the same. Because we all saw the difference that it made to us.’

Whilst at university she was given a Caroline Haslett scholarship ‘which made a real difference.’ Dame Caroline Haslett, born in 1895, was an electrical engineer and inspirational champion of women’s rights. Helen also won the John Bowyer Buckley and Thérèse Montefiore prizes: ‘what would now be regarded as tiny amounts of money, but they made a massive difference to someone like me, where there wasn’t a background of affluence.’

What would she say to someone starting out at Girton today? ‘Grasp every opportunity to broaden your experience, enjoy what you’re doing and, whatever you do, put 110% of yourself into it.’