Welcome address to the International Research Council on the Biomechanics of Injury Conference
Old Library, Trinity College Dublin
Wednesday, 12 September 2012
Thank you, Dr Ciaran Simms - for that tremendous introduction. And certainly I have to say that I don’t think I’ve launched, as Provost, an international symposium as close to my own research interests as this one, so it really is a great pleasure to be with you this evening and to welcome, for the first time to Trinity, and only the second time ever to Ireland, this International Research Council on the Biomechanics of Injury - IRCOBI.
We have about 170 delegates present, from academia, industry and public bodies, with many of you coming from abroad. I hope that you’ll enjoy the conference and I’m delighted that time has been set aside for you to get a sense of Trinity and of Dublin. I congratulate the organisers and sponsors on an excellent programme.
As Ciaran has said, we’re now in the Long Room of the Old Library, which was memorably described by a former student as “a cathedral of books... the dusty and resinous smell of centuries of learning”. This room houses 200,000 of the college’s oldest and most valuable tomes.
* * *
This is the third international engineering conference that I’ve launched in Trinity in the past five days. I congratulate the School of Engineering on tremendous activity! This conference, the Biomechanics of Injury, seems to me particularly important for Trinity, and for Ireland, for two reasons:
First, as many of you are aware, Ireland has unfortunately had a traditionally poor record in road safety. In fact, the very first recorded automobile fatality occurred in this country, in a small town in the midlands in 1869. The casualty was an exceptional woman, Mary Ward, a celebrated microscopist, artist, astronomer and naturalist, who fell from a steam carriage and died after crush injuries from its heavy iron wheels.
Second, for much of the late twentieth century Ireland’s road safety record compared poorly with most of Western Europe’s. Fortunately, due to large improvements - including in road quality, and in combatting speeding and drunk driving - our record is now far better. Last year an EU report confirmed Ireland as the sixth safest place to drive in the EU 27. This is a wonderful achievement. The last time this conference was held in Ireland was in 1996 when our record in road safety was still poor. It’s great to be welcoming you back to such an improved environment. And of course biomechanists, medics, equipment design engineers, accident analysts - all IRCOBI’s members - were instrumental in building the better safety systems that have helped reduce our accidental injury levels.
Of course, as we all know, the price of success is more work - which is another way of saying that the price of peace is eternal vigilance.
So we need to continue to make significant fundamental and applied advances in our understanding of injury biomechanics, necessary to design a safer road transport environment, in which fatalities and serious injuries can be further reduced.
And as we know, the people of the world all want to move about more. There are over 1 billion cars in the world, and about 60 million cars will be produced in 2012 alone, a quarter of these in China.
So road safety will remain, for the foreseeable future, a major international consideration, with the World Health Organization predicting that countries such as India and China will be the main sources of road fatalities in the coming years.
So there remains much work to be done, and the second reason why I’m so delighted to welcome this conference is that bioengineering is a research pillar for Trinity - and one where we have proven international expertise.
As Ciaran has said, a decade ago I helped establish the Trinity Centre for Bioengineering. Impact biomechanics is a key research area in the Centre, for which we must thank, in large part, Ciaran who is a Prinicipal Investigator in the Centre, and to Gary Lyons, formerly Senior Lecturer in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering who pioneered this subject in the Trinity engineering curriculum.
I first became aware of Ciaran’s injury biomechanics research through his PhD, on whiplash back in the late 1990s, in which the nonlinear behaviour of muscles was modelled using differentially tensioned rubber bands. Years later I launched his book on Pedestrian and Cyclist Injury Biomechanics, published by Springer in 2009.
Dublin has a lot of cyclists, as you’ll see walking round, and the number is on the rise, which is great, but cyclists are of course vulnerable to injury, as are pedestrians. This is the subject of two sessions in the main programme, and is also one of the preconference workshops.
Ciaran is also currently engaged, together with a company, McElmeel Mobility in Northern Ireland, in developing crash-resistant swivel seats for easy access to vehicles. This project is a great instance of academic-industry co-operation for the benefit of the general public. One of the reasons why I became so interested in bioengineering was precisely because it is such a potent and fertile area for academic-industry partnerships.
Innovation - the commercialisation of research - is probably the most exciting growth area for universities over the past fifteen years. Today, in universities round the world, staff and students are encouraged to think about using their research to directly grow the economy and serve society - with the result that industry projects, such as Ciaran’s crash-resistant swivel seat, are greatly on the increase, as are campus spin-outs.
This level of engagement certainly wasn’t happening when I was student here in the 1980s, and was only just beginning when I joined the faculty in 1995. It has been tremendously exciting to witness and participate in such a revolution - and I don’t think revolution’s too strong a word.
Innovation is now routinely referred to as the third pillar of university activity. There is teaching, research and innovation. But I’d like to move on from the analogy of three pillars - I prefer to think of innovation not as separate from, but as permeating, both education and research. In Trinity - as in other world-class universities - education, research and innovation are welded together into a common academic enterprise of discovery.
All university research areas can be part of this innovation revolution, but there’s no doubt that bioengineering is, if you like, in the avant-garde. It’s one of the pioneering ‘innovation disciplines’. That’s very evident tonight where academics and postgrads, members of the automotive safety industry, and national road safety bodies are gathered for this conference - in a common enterprise of investigation and discovery.
The excitement surrounding innovation is, of course, partly to do with increased revenue for universities, at a time when public funds are stretched and universities are greatly in need of such revenue. But, more than this, innovation and industry-academia partnerships centralise the importance of the research we do. The pejorative inference in the term “ivory tower” was always wrong. Universities have always engaged with, and oxygenated society. But there’s no doubt that they are now doing so more directly than ever before - and I expect the old sense of “ivory tower”, as applied to universities, to disappear during my lifetime.
Your area of expertise, biomechanics, has saved lives and improved quality of life. It will continue to do so.
I look forward to great future advances in this field, including in sports injury mechanics - an area where we have not, in Trinity, at least, much concentrated, but which is ripe for development.
Thank you for traveling to be here this week, and I wish all a most successful conference.
* * *