Register for News Updates

Receive regular e-mail news updates from KAUST.

KAUST Inauguration Symposium Speaker

Lord Alec Broers

U. K. House of Lords

Lord Alec Nigel Broers is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Diamond Light Source, the United Kingdom’s largest new experimental scientific facility in three decades, a position he assumed in 2008, upon completing a four-year term as Chairman of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee. He is past president (2001-2006) of the Royal Academy of Engineering of the United Kingdom, and was also the Vice-chancellor (President) of Cambridge University from 1996 until 2003.

A pioneer of nanotechnology, Lord Broers was the first person to use the scanning electron microscope for the fabrication of micro-miniature structures. Lord Broers was educated at Melbourne University and the University of Cambridge (Gonville and Caius College), earning his BSc degree in physics in Australia in 1959, and his MSc and PhD in electrical sciences and engineering from Cambridge in 1965. He then worked in the research and development laboratories of IBM in the United States for 19 years, was named an IBM Fellow, and served on the Corporate Technical Committee. He returned to Cambridge in 1984 to become Professor of Electrical Engineering (1984-1996) and Fellow of Trinity College (1985-1990). He subsequently became Master of Churchill College (1990-1996) and Head of the University Engineering Department (1993-1996).

In 2005, Lord Broers was invited by the British Broadcasting Corporation to present the Reith Lectures, one of the relatively few occasions on which this renowned forum has been devoted to scientific and technological issues. In the five lectures, which subsequently became the book “The Triumph of Technology,” he sets out his belief that technology can and should hold the key to the future, making the case that applied science is rivaling pure science both in importance and in intellectual interest.

Lord Broers was knighted in 1998 for his services to education and created a Life Peer in 2004. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and awardee of several honorary degrees.

Lord Broers has sung with some of the world’s finest choral ensembles and has an avid interest in high fidelity electronics.