IT-SAFE Announcement
We are pleased to announce that Dr Graham
Spinardi has been appointed as Senior Research Fellow on the Integrating
Technical and Social Aspects of Fire Safety Engineering and Expertise (IT-SAFE)
project. This is a prestigious interdisciplinary project designed to improve
fire safety and the quality of the built environment through better integration
of social and engineering research, supported by the University of Edinburgh,
The Ove Arup Foundation, and the Royal Academy of Engineering (see https://www.stis.ed.ac.uk/research_projects/it-safe).
Dr Spinardi has a long record at the
University of Edinburgh researching the social shaping of technologies, with
particular emphasis on historical studies of military innovation and other
state-funded research. Major research grants include: a comparative study of
innovation by firms in the UK, Germany, Japan and the USA, based on inventions
patented and licensed by the British Technology Group and its predecessor, the
National Research Development Corporation; a study of key developments in UK
radar technology and their relationship to both strategic requirements, and to
their exploitation for dual-use applications; a history of US Ballistic Missile
Defence technology, focusing on the way that technical knowledge is
constructed, particularly as regards claims about performance, and how test
performance is extrapolated to operational conditions; and, a study of how the
conservative nature of airliner development has limited the uptake of
potentially greener alternative technologies.
