Careers
Dr William (Bill) Nuttall
Job Title: Senior Lecturer
Organisation: Cambridge University
I am Senior Lecturer in 'Technology Policy' at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. I launched the 'Technology Policy' masters degree course in early 2002. The course aims to take scientists and engineers and train them for policy positions in the public and private sectors. Many of the issues we consider relate to national infrastructures such as airports, network utilities (gas, electricity, water etc.), aerospace, energy, biomedicine and the environment. The degree is a nine-month programme offered by Cambridge University and it was based upon the long-standing masters programme in Technology and Public Policy offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. The development of the course was funded by the Cambridge-MIT TPP colleagues.
My faculty position in Technology Policy at Cambridge followed a career that started in experimental condensed matter physics. I did my PhD at MIT as a Fulbright Scholar before working as a physics post-doc at Keele and Birmingham universities in the UK. I have always been interested in why the world is the way it is. As a child I used to tinker with and dismantle things. This curiosity led me into physics and questions such as why ice floats on water, but it also led me into questions such as why does physics get more public money that ballet?
In 1997 I was hired by the Institute of Physics to work in their London headquarters on issues of science policy. It was a wonderful opportunity that allowed me to swap an environment of big government laboratories for the corridors of power in Westminster, Whitehall and Brussels. The job brought me into contact with a very wide range of interesting and stimulating people - politicians, leading scientists and Whitehall mandarins. One policy maker once described my role on a committee as being like that of a staff officer - in the general's tent when strategy is being formulated, making helpful comments but not being the one to make any of the actual decisions. After academia such a role can be a little invisible, but the access to ideas and information outweighs this.
In early 2002 I moved back into academia, but not in a physics department. My current job at Cambridge University is shared between Judge Business School and the university's Engineering Department. My science background allows me to empathise with my students - who like me intend to move away from the laboratory or workshop bench to the world of policy. I particularly enjoy the way our approach to Technology Policy at Cambridge has a 'professional practice' emphasis meaning that we don't concentrate on details on the theory of how things should be, but rather we train people to deal with the realities of how things actually are.
I encounter many physicists in my current working life. The training that physics gives - i.e. the ability to reduce a problem to its fundamentals - is very useful in tackling complex technology policy questions. Policy work suits people who are interested in social science issues - psychology, sociology, economics, law and politics. For instance, I am very interested in the fact that the public say they are scared by nuclear power - to my mind the most interesting issue there is not whether nuclear power is safe enough, but rather the fact that the public say that they are scared. Nuclear power is said to be a 'dread' risk for interesting social and cultural reasons.
In my case physics training (to PhD and beyond) was sufficient training for a career in science and technology policy. Importantly it is not a necessary path and I find myself working with economists, engineers, chemists and biologists. These multi-disciplinary teams are very stimulating and I am certain that they will continue to benefit from the presence of physicists, whatever the issues in the future.
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