Lifetime of engineering excellence is honoured by peers

An Imperial College scientist’s life long career of innovation and discovery was celebrated at an awards ceremony - News

27 September 2007
By Colin Smith

An Imperial College scientist’s life long career of innovation and discovery was celebrated at The Engineer magazine’s Technology and Innovation Awards last week.

Professor Colin Caro    , from the Department of Bioengineering, was honoured with a Special Award for Outstanding Personal Achievement, voted for by engineering professionals.

The award recognised Professor Caro’s distinguished contribution to physiological and medical research and, more recently, the wide range of potential engineering applications that have arisen from his work.

“I am a bit shocked to win this award. I thought I was invited for a free lunch,” he joked.

Professor Caro said he had received a number of honours during his 40-year career, but thought that this award was “very nice indeed”.

“It gives me enormous pleasure to be honoured by engineers. I started life as a medic and it is ‘fun’ to be recognised for my work in engineering,” he said.

Professor Caro said he had been given the award because he’d been “lucky” enough to make discoveries in the field of fluid mechanics. Earlier in his career Professor Caro was the first to show that the disease of the arteries, atherosclerosis, which causes heart attacks and strokes, actually occurs in local regions where the blood flow is sluggish. His work countered the prevailing theory which had stood for more than 100 years.

“They thought that the blood damaged the walls, in fact it protected it,” he said.

In the last 10 years, Professor Caro has been researching the complex geometry of the arteries; an area he says has been over looked by the science community.

“There has been a prevailing assumption amongst scientists that arteries are like straight pipes, in fact, they are highly curved in a defined way.”

Professor Caro said the complex curvatures in arteries causes the flow of blood to twist and swirl, helping it to mix. He said his discovery has important applications in medicine, especially in the area of grafts and stents, biology and biomedical engineering. His complex modelling also has industrial uses.

“I knew my ideas had broader industrial applications so I started a spinout engineering company. Engineers have tended to use straight pipes and then, through my work, we found that there are tremendous advantages to using complex three dimensional geometric shapes in piping. This modelling is now being used in the petrochemicals industry and in North Sea oil recovery."

Imperial also saw success in the University Spin-out category with Ionscope also receiving an award for a business, formed within the last five years, which commercially exploits a technical innovation.

The company was recognised for developing, manufacturing and selling systems for scanning ion conductance microscopy. This technology is able to produce images of living cell membranes at a resolution fifty times better than conventional optical microscopes.

The Engineer Magazine’s Technology and Innovation Awards were established this year to celebrate the vibrant and innovative technologies emerging from the university sector, its spin-out companies, and business partnerships. More than 150 leading scientists, entrepreneurs and business people from across the UK participated in the ceremony, which was held this year at Imperial College London.