College toasts long serving staff

Scores of long serving Imperial staff attended a reception last night (20 March 2013) to mark their 20, 25 or 30 years of service at the College.

President & Rector Sir Keith O’Nions was joined by HR Director Louise Lindsay and Professor Jeff Magee, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, to congratulate staff who joined the College in 1982, 1987 or 1992.

Sir Keith told the guests: “Since you joined the College, we’ve cemented our place as a world top ten university. Your can-do attitude, common sense and dedication to improving everything we do have enabled Imperial to remain agile, flexible and innovative.

“We’re witnessing this right now as Imperial West transforms our capacity to translate and commercialise the College’s groundbreaking research. It’s thanks to people like you that Imperial in 2013 is – to quote the Mayor of London at Imperial West’s launch event – ‘the greatest scientific institution in the world’.”

Sir Keith congratulates a long serving colleague.

Many of the staff – celebrating a collective 745 years at Imperial – reflected on how much has changed at the College over the years.

Thomas Weil, a Consultant Web Analyst marking his 25^th year at Imperial, joined the College in 1987 – two years before Tim Berners Lee unleashed the World Wide Web – and has witnessed first-hand the way in which “computing at Imperial has changed beyond all recognition”.

He said: “When I joined we had three big mainframes with several hundred passive terminals connected to them. Those were then replaced by Unix servers linked to active workstations. Then came the PC revolution. Now we’re rapidly changing again to handle mobile computing.

“With some of the finest minds here, I was involved with setting up one of the first corporate websites in Europe at Imperial in the early 1990s – way before the web entered public consciousness. A little later a group of us wrote a web ‘content management system’ way before any of the big IT companies. A derivative of the system remains in use today in the Faculty of Medicine.

“It is a great privilege to be involved, even in just a small way, with our students who will become the scientists, doctors, technologists, entrepreneurs and even Nobel laureates of the future.”

Several guests swapped favourite stories of their time at Imperial.

During his 20 years at the College, Senior Security Officer David Cane helped arrange protection for the Queen as she opened the Sir Alexander Fleming Building in 1998, as well as a secret event with Salman Rushdie following his subjection to a fatwa.

David’s favourite memory, however, is his efforts to coordinate the international rescue of a student expedition that got stuck up a glacier in Alaska: “We thought it was a joke at first and we were like, ‘OK, pull the other one’. We nearly put the phone down. But in the end we took down their coordinates, called the Metropolitan Police and eventually got through to the local rescue service, and the students got off in the end.”