WHEN YOU PICTURE A FARM IN IRELAND, it probably doesn’t invoke images of engineering. But growing up in that environment, Jason Stafford was in fact surrounded by machines, motion, repair, and failure long before he had the vocabulary for any of it.
“I didn’t really recognize engineering too much,” Stafford said. “But as I got older, I realized how much I was exposed to that and how fortunate I was to be exposed to engineering.”
The interest in ‘how things work’ eventually led him toward mechanical engineering. The first chapter of his career centered on fluid mechanics and heat transfer, areas he was drawn to as an undergraduate, he said. But over time, his work began to shift toward a different problem: how to turn advanced materials from promising research into something industry can actually make and use.
“One of the big challenges that was being stressed was around production,” he said. “So how do we get these materials into real applications with scale up and production? And I thought, okay, well, engineers would be quite good at addressing this.”
The overlap made sense as a next step for him. Some of the production processes being explored required knowledge of fluid mechanics, giving Stafford a way into the materials field without abandoning the foundation he had already built.
Today, much of his work focuses on low-dimensional materials, including graphene. “Graphite is like a deck of cards,” Stafford said. “It’s made-up of multiple layers or multiple cards of graphene. And so what we’re doing is we’re developing fluid mechanical approaches to separate those cards out.”
The goal is to produce graphene and other two-dimensional materials without relying so heavily on harsh solvents or slow, hard-to-scale processes. His group has also worked on ways to identify what material has been produced more quickly, he said. Traditional characterization techniques, such as electron microscopy, can be slow, sometimes taking weeks.
“That’s a problem for large scale production because if you’re producing large batches of this, then you don’t want to waste two or three weeks before you figure out what the material is that you’ve produced,” he said.
Getting Down to Business
That challenge led Stafford to co-found 2D Nano, a company working to scale up production methods for two-dimensional materials. Moving from the lab to a commercial system has been one of the hardest parts, he said.
“It’s technically challenging because you do all this work on a lab scale, you’ve proved it out, and filed IP on that,” Stafford explained. “But when you get to the point where you have to make it bigger, there are a lot of challenges there because you’re coming up with a technology that you can’t buy off the shelf. You’re building it yourself, you’re designing it yourself.”
The commercial side is its own learning curve. Producing the material is only one part of the equation; customers also need to understand how to use it in their own products and processes.
“It’s our responsibility to prepare young engineers for the opportunities and challenges of things like AI. It’s important they don’t lose faith in their training, and that mechanical engineering will allow them to engage in any role, working with AI or otherwise.”
—Jason Stafford, Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering, University of Birmingham
Stafford grew up playing hurling, the fast, contact-heavy Irish sport he still occasionally practices with a hurl and ball he keeps in his car. He recommends watching a few videos online, since the sport “usually causes a bit of a surprise.”
Stafford worked in an industrial research lab, Bell Labs, which is part of Nokia. Operating closer to industry, he saw how research can move quickly when it is connected to a defined product or service.
“I enjoy the industry part because of that kind of speed of innovation,” he said. “But what I also really enjoy in academia are two things. One is that you can work on long term problems and not worry about that being shifted away from you. And the second, you have an influence on the engineers that are coming in the future.”
His advice to engineers deciding between industry and academia: make sure teaching is something you actually enjoy. “An academic job is not a research job,” he said. “You have administration, teaching to do, and then your research parts.”
His teaching role now sits alongside three main areas of work in his research group: making low-dimensional materials more sustainably, using those materials for thermal management, and applying them to environmental treatment.
Nature Made
The common thread of sustainability is one that Stafford connects partly to his upbringing. Growing up on a farm made environmental impact feel immediate.
“When you’re close to nature and seeing the impact of things on the environment, it’s inherently there to try and make sure that you don’t have a large footprint,” he said.
For Stafford, impact means making sure research has a path toward use. It starts earlier than many people would think, by considering who the work is meant to serve and what those people or industries actually need.
“You can spend a lot of time in research,” Stafford said. “And if it’s not going to fit with what the stakeholder wants, whether that stakeholder is society or industry, then it’s not going to go anywhere.”
He sees a similar responsibility in preparing future engineers for a changing field. Artificial intelligence may reshape parts of engineering, but Stafford believes mechanical engineers should not lose confidence in the fundamentals they are learning.
“It’s our responsibility to prepare young engineers for the opportunities and challenges of things like AI. It’s important they don’t lose faith in their training, and that mechanical engineering will allow them to engage in any role, working with AI or otherwise.”
Sarah Alburakeh is strategic content editor.
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