A professor who helped discover how Richard III died is among 50 people who have been photographed for an exhibition celebrating half a century of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Prof Sarah Hainsworth, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Durham University, will feature in the 50for50 exhibition at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford.
She helped to establish the injuries that led to Richard’s death, after his skeleton was discovered under a council car park in Leicester in 2012.
The exhibition was commissioned by the Royal Academy of Engineering and is travelling to venues across the UK as part of its 50th anniversary.
Hainsworth, who was born in Baildon and raised in Middleham, North Yorkshire, said the exhibition was a “fantastic opportunity to show to young people the diversity of engineering careers and what engineers do in reality”.
She said: “I think when you look at it as an exhibition as a whole it just shows the breadth of the profession and the exciting things engineers work on.”
She was included for her work as a materials and forensic engineer, studying what makes knives and other implements sharp and the forces involved in stabbing, as well as the tool marks left behind on bone.
“When the remains for Richard III were found under a car park in Leicester I got to look at the injuries to the skull, the ribs, the pelvis and to try and work with colleagues to determine what were the weapons that would have been used on the battlefield,” she explained.
“That’s the thing people really don’t appreciate about engineering, they think we just do the same thing all the time but even if you’ve got a specialism the number of ways in which you can apply that specialism across engineering is really varied.”
