Alice Moncaster and Patrick Manu applied to be co-Directors of CABER, and were appointed in February 2025, taking over from the previous director Lamine Mahdjoubi. These are our personal stories.
Alice’s story:
I grew up in an Elizabethan (1560s) house in rural Essex, and a love of historic buildings has stayed with me ever since. My girls’ grammar school in Colchester encouraged me to study my favourite subjects at A levels of Maths, Physics, English Literature and Art. However when I applied to Cambridge to study engineering they said that neither English nor Art were relevant (I disagree), so in the final year I had to swap Art for Further Maths.
Engineering at Cambridge in the early 90s was tough, and about 90% male, but luckily I was at an all women’s college, Newnham (also the prettiest of the Cambridge colleges) so I survived. Back then Cambridge only awarded Bachelor of Arts (BA) degrees, and a Master of Arts (MA) was awarded automatically seven years after you ‘matriculate’ (first join the university) so long as you stayed out of prison. So despite having had to give up art, I officially have a BA and MA in Engineering.
After university I worked as a civil engineer for Balfour Beatty in Exeter and Sidcup, including roads, dams, sewerage treatment works, and a small geotechnical investigation for the new Channel Tunnel. But the UK was in recession and work was slow, and I was tempted by a job in the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre at Bristol University. Therefore I first moved to Bristol in 1994, helping first to design and build a ‘shear stack’ – a huge wobbly box sat on the shaking table filled with sand – and then my own laboratory research project using piezoelectric bender elements to measure the shear modulus of sand at very small strains, for which I was awarded an MSc. I also met my husband working at Bristol University, and when he got a new job at the British Antarctic Survey moved with him back across the country to Cambridge.
Here I moved back into industry for a few years, designing buildings at Harris and Sutherland (part of the Babtie Group at the time) and then at Mott MacDonald, while we juggled life, now with two young daughters. But I was becoming increasingly concerned about climate change and the impact of construction, and once the girls were in primary school I left Mott MacDonald, designed a low carbon extension, and wrote a research proposal. I was very fortunate to be offered PhD funding in 2007 to undertake this by Professor Jacquie Burgess in the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA. It was EPSRC funding, but Jacquie and Peter Simmons, who became my principal supervisor, were social scientists, and I am eternally grateful to them for introducing me to a whole new way of understanding the world.
Shortly after starting my PhD I was also offered a research post by Professor Peter Guthrie at the Centre for Sustainable Development at Cambridge University. I then also added two more roles at Cambridge, Deputy Director of the Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment programme, and Director of Studies for engineering undergraduates at my old college. It therefore took me until 2012 to finish my PhD, and is not an approach I’d recommend!
I was made a lecturer at Cambridge in 2014, and also Director of the IDBE. However new master’s courses in both the Architecture and Engineering Departments threatened the IDBE with closure, despite being much-loved by industry, so I was asked to review it, identifying the solution to move it into the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership where it still lives.
In 2017 I moved to the Open University as a Senior Lecturer. I joined the friendly and wonderfully multi-disciplinary Design Group, and also instigated the first Built Environment research cluster, and was then appointed the first cross-university Sustainability Lead for their new Open Societal Challenges research initiative. I remain a Visiting Professor at the OU (and still miss my colleagues there). However I couldn’t turn down the opportunity in 2023 to return to Bristol at long last, to a professorship at UWE in the School of Architecture and Environment. I had long known of UWE for its strong focus on built environment research, and this suited my interdisciplinary background perfectly.
In summer 2023 we moved partly to a flat in Bristol, and after 2 years living in both the East and West of the country are at last on the verge of buying a house here and moving completely. It seemed only fair that this time my husband moved for my job, and he is now enjoying his new job at Everoze. One daughter has stayed in Cambridge for now, and the other is in Edinburgh, and we are discovering that the trains are not very quick!
I choose to work in academia because of the many things I love and value about it: working with inspiring and thoughtful colleagues, from all disciplines and all backgrounds; the opportunity to think deeply about a problem, often working with others to together create genuinely new insights and ways forward; and the chance to make a difference in the world, however small. I continue to be incredibly impressed with the excellent research achieved by our UWE and CABER colleagues, and together I believe we can develop existing and new areas of excellence in built environment research, building on CABER’s deserved reputation. I hope that CABER as a Centre can help support all its members to fulfil their research potential, and that we can help to make our built environment fit for a better future for all.
Patrick’s story:
I am Professor of Innovative Construction and Project Management in the School of Architecture and Environment at the University of the West of England. I have expertise in construction management (CM), project management (PM), and quantity surveying (QS) research, teaching, and practice. I hold BSc in Building Technology (1st Class honours), PGCert. (with Distinction) in Academic Practice, PhD in Construction Project Management, Fellowship of the UK Higher Education Academy (now Advanced HE), and chartered membership of the Chartered Institute of Building.
I grew up in my home country Ghana where I did my basic and secondary education. While I was not the “sharpest” in my school, I was considered one the sharpest in my year group, and so at a point I was nicknamed, “Archimedes” or “Archi” for short, by my mates in secondary school who thought I was good at physics. My academic career started at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Ghana) as a teaching assistant (TA) in 2005 after obtaining my BSc from the university. My academic career took a break at the end of my TA post in 2006, and I worked as a contractor’s quantity surveyor providing project management support on several building projects of varying scale and complexity. During that period, I led and won bids for my employers, and I also developed my own spreadsheets for project cost estimating and cashflow analyses, which I subsequently gave to QS professionals for a fee but gladly gave it to my then father-in-law to-be (a quantity surveyor) for free – a fantastic future investment! I also developed spreadsheets to help university students to plan their studies and predict their academic performance – haha! I was just fascinated with numbers and MS Excel.
My journey towards becoming a lecturer continued when I enrolled on a PhD programme at the University of Wolverhampton (UK) on a studentship in 2009 and completed in 2012. From that period, I have held academic posts at the University of Wolverhampton, University of West London, City University London (now City St George’s, University of London), University of the West of England (UWE Bristol), and more recently University of Manchester where I was a Reader and School Deputy Head of Research before rejoining UWE in 2023.
Construction is one of the most hazardous industries worldwide, and this fuels my passion for construction safety, health, and well-being research to make construction safer. Besides occupational safety, health, and well-being, I am also interested in the application of digital technologies in construction. I have been involved as principal investigator (PI) and co-investigator in several research projects funded by organisations including government agencies and charities such as Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Innovate UK, Lloyd’s Register Foundation, Health and Safety Executive, British Council, Academy of Medical Sciences, and Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology (MIGHT). I led (as PI) a large international consortium to develop the first web-based application for assessing design for occupational safety and health organisational capability, which won an innovation award from HS2 Ltd. Additionally, I was co-investigator of the novel BIM-based risk library which has been awarded two prestigious industry awards (i.e., the buildingSMART International Awards 2020, and the Health and Safety Software of the Year – Construction Computing Awards 2021).
I enjoy writing about my research and I have over 150 publications including articles in leading Q1 journals. I led an international initiative to publish the first book on construction health and safety in developing countries, which won the 2019 Taylor & Francis Outstanding Book and Digital Product Award within the best monograph in engineering category. Subsequently, I have led international initiatives to produce two novel books titled: (1) Handbook of Construction Safety, Health and Well-being in the Industry 4.0 Era; and (2) Construction Safety, Health and Well-being in the COVID-19 Era.
I love teaching and supporting the development of others including students and colleagues to enable them to excel in their academic and career paths. Across my career I have taught, assessed and mentored over 3,000 students in higher education including supervising dissertations, undertaking assessments, and supervising and examining doctoral candidates in UK and overseas universities. I have had the privilege of publishing exciting articles with several of my students.
Beyond publications and involvement in research projects, over the years my contribution to the research and knowledge exchange has included serving as: associate editor for three journals (i.e., Safety Science; Heliyon; and ICE Management Procurement and Law of Heliyon); a member of the EPSRC peer review college; a detailed assessor for the Australian Research Council; a member of British Council Newton Fund Engineering and Physical Sciences Panel; a member of the Association of Researchers in Construction Management (ARCOM) committee; and a member of the standard setting committee and co-author of the International Construction Measurement Standards (ICMS). Additionally, I review for several built environment and multidisciplinary journals and conferences. I have delivered talks and keynote lectures at major academic and practitioner conferences and events in UK and overseas.
In case you are wondering what I do when I don’t have my academic hat on, well, I have a lovely family – a wife and three kids (including a baby) – who keep me occupied. Helping with kids’ homework is a big thing. I once read that if you are a kid and you think you hate homework, wait till you become an adult with kids, and you’ll hate it even more! I couldn’t agree more, but it’s not all gloomy as I get to occasionally play video games and enjoy movie nights with the kids and their friends. “Puss in Boots” (El Macho Gato) is one of my favourites.
As I conclude, I wish to note that all that I have achieved till date has been enabled by others – my parents, pastors, teachers, collaborators, colleagues, mentors, managers, students, friends, family, and more. Thanks to them all and thanks to CABER!
