Julia King, principal of the engineering faculty, Imperial College London

Credit: J.CHLEBIK

It was the champagne lifestyle that first attracted Julia King to a career in science. During the optimistic 1960s, says Imperial's new head of engineering, the newspapers seemed full of pictures of scientists celebrating their latest breakthrough with a bottle of bubbly.

“Particle physics was the exciting face of science when I was young,” says King, who was born the year the European particle-physics lab CERN was set up: both have just celebrated 50.(see CV).

At the University of Cambridge, where she went to study physics, King discovered new interests, but the switch to materials was painless. For that reason, she says, “I'm a strong supporter of courses such as natural sciences at Cambridge, where you can sample a range of things”.

Despite the good pay and prospects on offer, and the excitement of seeing one's ideas become a product, King can see reasons why women haven't made more inroads into engineering. These include loneliness, the work–life balance — she and her husband are enjoying living together after years of weekend commuting — and a lack of role models that could make a woman's ambition seem somehow inappropriate.

“Engineering can still be quite an oppressive environment for a woman, though not intentionally,” she explains. “When you're finding it tough there isn't an obvious person to have a chat with, and you may not see that, in other parts of the company, women have made it up the management ladder.”

Excellent female science teachers were her own first role models, but she advises students to be open to guidance from all sources. One of the most useful pieces of advice she received was from an old technician at a US aeroengine maintenance plant, who said the engine dressings — an intricately designed mass of pipes and wires — gave his team hours of extra work when they had to be dismantled. “That taught me to think of what's useful to the customer,” she says.

She's keen on an area that could draw into engineering some of the young female science students who currently head for medical school. At Imperial's new bioengineering department, 50% of undergraduates are women. And as she says, “That's something to celebrate”.