Leaving a legacy gift case study: Edward Steers

As the IOP transitions into its new 2024-29 Physics for our future strategy, we want to reflect on the impact legacy gifts played in our outgoing strategy, Unlocking the future. In this article, we pay tribute to Professor Edward Steers and his legacy gift to the IOP.

About Professor Steers

Professor Edward Baddeley Mitchell Steers served as a member of staff at London Metropolitan University and its predecessor institutions for almost 60 years, starting in 1959. He began as a physics lecturer and became Honorary Professor in 1987. In 2009, Professor Steers was awarded the Doctor of Science, the highest honour the university could award, for his scientific work.

He gained his PhD in spectroscopy at the physics department of Imperial College London in 1957, and he went on to become renowned in the sub-field of glow discharge spectroscopy. He continuously championed research collaborations between European universities in this field; he was instrumental in securing European Union funding to continue and expand research within it.

An honorary session to commemorate the scientific work of Professor Steers was organised at the 42nd Annual Conference of the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies, held in the US in 2015, which Professor Steers himself attended. This showcased the respect that he commanded from his peers internationally for his work throughout his career.

He passed away on 19 February 2018.

Information on Professor Steers’s life has been taken from the obituary written by Weiss, Z et al at the Institute of Chemistry, Slovak Academy of Sciences (2018), titled Sixty years of spectroscopic research: a tribute to Professor Edward B M Steers.

About the gift

We are truly honoured that Professor Steers decided to include the IOP in his will. We received his gift in 2019, and it was not only generous, but unrestricted. In doing so, he entrusted us with the flexibility to allocate his gift to the areas of our work that we felt required it most, allowing it to achieve the most impact. This benefitted several programmes and workstreams across our Unlocking the Future strategy.

Impact of gift

Due to his generosity, we were well-placed to deliver an ambitious new strategy, one that we felt would have a long-lasting impact on the physics ecosystem and community, laying the foundations for a diverse physics talent pipeline for the future.

Unlocking the Future embraced bolder ambitions, programmes and achievements than the IOP had previously strived for. Some of the highlights of this strategy included:

• The launch of our Limit Less campaign, which addresses the persistent stereotypes, prejudices and barriers young people face because of their background to pursuing and enjoying a physics education and career. Our strategy has worked closely with key influencers around young people, including the media, political leaders, businesses, teachers and parents/carers. Limit Less has overseen our Bin the Boffin initiative to fight against incorrect and stereotypical portrayals of physicists in popular media outlets, which can discourage young people from underrepresented groups from wanting to pursue a physics career. Highpoints for this initiative include receiving coverage from Radio 2 and prompting the Daily Mirror to reinstate its ban on the word boffin.
• Elsewhere in Limit Less, the launch and expansion of the Eurekas competition has made 11-16-year-olds of all interests see physics in a different light, receiving more than 200 fun entries in 2023. All these showcased young people doing physics in creative, different ways. We have accompanied this work with our UK- and Ireland-wide public engagement programme, targeting young people and their families with fun-filled physics activities; displays at our new buildings in London and Dublin; and targeted community spaces and public events.
• The strategy also set the ambition for the IOP to ‘shape the debate’ on the physics landscape, including on skills and technology. In one example, our quantum impact project brought together key stakeholders from government, academia and industry to evaluate and highlight the importance of this technology. Our subsequent report of our findings was highly influential: in December 2023, the UK government pledged £2.5bn of funding to unlock quantum technologies over a 10-year period.

Professor Steers’s gift came at a crucially important time. The UK and Ireland had gone into lockdown as part of their respective governments’ Covid restrictions, and charities in both countries felt the impact of this on their operations. Gifts such as this enabled the IOP to maintain our ambitions and focus, especially at a time when our fundraising activities were severely constrained.

Importance of legacies to the IOP

A gift in your will to the IOP is an excellent way to leave your own, lasting legacy. You will support lots more talented young people from underrepresented backgrounds in accessing an enjoyable physics education. Such gifts power the physics community of tomorrow in fulfilling its innovative potential – its unique capability to find the solutions we need to the most pressing global challenges.

Edward Steers images courtesy of the European Working Group for Glow Discharge Spectroscopy