Name: Terry Thomas

Job title: Approved Teacher (formerly senior Lecturer)

Department: Engineering

Number of years at Warwick: 51

There’s no such thing as a typical day, but, in brief, my job involves...

As now a part-timer: I do some lecturing, PhD and undergraduate project supervision plus international collaboration re my field (engineering for the tropics) by email and by periodic fieldwork. I’ve been trying to revive an old interest – via a Global Research Priority - to get the university more involved in urban studies but with a poor-megacities focus. Home life is quieter now all my daughters have fledged.

My most memorable moments at Warwick have been...

In the early years (1960s) it was exciting to be building a new department, then for a quarter of a century to be running an undergraduate degree program for ‘radical’ engineers. That was an activity dismissed at its start-up in 1980 by Jack Butterworth (“**** windmills!”) but allowed to go ahead. I’m still in close touch with many of those very bright students. Of outstanding colleagues, Arthur Shercliff, our founding professor, and Professor Peter Carpenter, both now alas dead, come most to mind. Both were polymaths, kind and entertaining.

In my time at Warwick, the biggest change I’ve seen is...

enormous growth in numbers which has made it impossible to now interact with much more than your own department (mine has staffing in the hundreds). I feel that teaching has been rather pushed out by research, for example staff are recruited mainly for their publications and very rarely for their professional experience, but teaching and professionalism are now regaining some ground.

But not all is change – some topics, like a fashion for beards, come round again. For me it’s amusing to be brushing dust off publications on driverless public transport – back in fashion - from when I ran a large research team on the topic in the 1970s.

Warwick's kept me here because...

I came to Warwick in my mid 20’s, after a decade spent mainly in practical engineering, and never managed to escape again. The University has looked after me well and allowed me to pursue a rather unfashionable specialism, involving much overseas fieldwork. Even down to living in African villages and Indian cities. My department has always felt benign and encouraging, largely free from intrigues and cabals! I’ve also enjoyed living in Coventry and am ready to accept I’m barely any longer a 4th generation Londoner but instead a Coventrian. Interaction between University and City has been rather sporadic, as if the University lived in some higher international domain and its academic staff has been naturally more Warwickshire than West Midlands. But now that we are probably the City’s biggest employer, that seems to be changing for the better. Of course when abroad, it helps to be associated with a known, prestigious and global university.

At the moment I'm really enjoying working on...

the too-fashionable theme of ‘sustainable development’ and its infrastructure and housing aspects. However at age 78 I’m at a stage where I most want to ‘hand over’ various interests and programmes to others.

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