Queen's Lecture 2022 at TU Berlin

Humans and their needs and abilities are at the heart of Sarah Sharples’ research on the future of mobility. This future includes autonomous vehicles such as cars, ships, and trains, as well as decarbonization, the net-zero goal, the future of travel, as well as holistic innovations in a global and intelligent transport system. A human factors researcher at the University of Nottingham, Professor Sharples is Chief Scientific Adviser for the United Kingdom’s Department for Transport. On 7 November 2022 she gave the traditional Queen’s Lecture at TU Berlin and spoke about the challenges politics, science, and society face when designing innovative mobility. 

Sarah Sharples is the Chief Scientific Adviser for the Department for Transport and Professor of Human Factors in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham. Over the past 27 years she has worked with a range of technologies to understand the interaction between people, technologies and their settings. Her work has been based in transport, healthcare and manufacturing, and many of her projects have involved developing and implementing methods for capturing work in real world and laboratory settings. She co-edited the 4^th edition of the Ergonomics and Human Factors text book ‘Evaluation of Human Work’ and was President of the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors from 2015-2016. From 2018-2021 she was Pro-Vice Chancellor for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and People at the University of Nottingham.

Interview with Sarah Sharples

The Queen's Lecture is supported by the British Embassy and the British Council Germany.

It is part of the programme of Science Week 2022.