Brian Houston

This week Catherine and Mike meet Brian Houston, Knowledge Exchange lecturer based in the Aura Innovation Centre, discussing his academic journey through research, teaching and knowledge exchange (KE).

Brian is a Mechanical Engineering Knowledge Exchange Lecturer, and Manager of the Aura InventX initiative. As a KE advocate he is passionate about facilitating collaboration through the delivery of multi-disciplinary Research, Development, and Innovation projects; and bringing together the Aura Innovation Centre (AIC) facility and team, academic and technical colleagues from across the University, and external stakeholders over real world innovation challenges. He aims to increase utilisation of, and accessibility to, University Research and Development capabilities; and to combine them with academic expertise to support Knowledge Exchange initiatives, increase research impact, and to encourage progressive education.

“The ethos of Knowledge Exchange is integral to both research and education [...] whenever I was standing in a lecture theatre projecting to a group of students, you could generally always be confident you were the most knowledgeable in that subject in that room at that particular time. In the Knowledge Exchange domain, I find myself standing in front of public audiences and you just look into the audience, and you could have someone there with 40 years in the industry, an expert in that particular area. At the same time, he is probably there to understand what I know about the subject at that time because he is open minded to be engaging in that way. So I tend to, as a result, go into a conversation humble, expecting to understand the person you are speaking to, before you are expected to be understood... and I think that works for the other domains as well. You need to know what level of understanding of your subject students have.“

You can contact Brian on LinkedIn.

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