Sam Sherwood-Hale spoke to Patricia Thornley, the Department for Transport’s newly appointed Chief Scientific Adviser, about the engineering and skills challenges facing the transport sector, the slow progress on transport carbon emissions, and what three decades of championing women in STEM have taught her about the pace of cultural change.

Patricia Thornley is Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems at Aston University’s Energy and Bioproducts Research Institute and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She has led major national research initiatives including the Supergen Bioenergy Hub and the Clean Maritime Policy Unit, and has served as deputy chair of the Department for Transport’s Scientific Advisory Council. She was appointed Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for Transport in December 2025.

What do you hope to bring from your career that Whitehall perhaps doesn’t have enough of yet?

I started in the industrial sector. I never wanted to be an academic. I only moved into research because I was frustrated with what was going on. We were trying to push innovation through and hit targets – but we felt we didn’t have the right policy framework to deliver on its potential.

So I ended up on a ministerial advisory board. There, I advised on the right policy to put in place to help with industrial sector research, but still there were challenges until we improved the academic-industry knowledge flow.

So there is a policy-research-industry triangle. You’ve got to have information flowing across all three in order to get innovation moving and to get change happening. I ended up moving into this role because I felt I’d done what I could on the academic side. I’ve led £36 million of national research projects in sustainable engineering. And at a certain point you think: in order to square off the triangle, you need to apply things in a different way.

I’ve always done some policy work, but I’m here to take that industrial understanding and the academic interdisciplinary perspective and bringing them across into policy, and seeing if we can make a difference by pulling at this corner of the triangle rather than, as I’ve done for the past twenty years, pulling at other corners.

Is this a reflection of where the science and policy conversation has got to?

I think it’s a personal thing. Each of us has a certain amount we can contribute in life, a certain set of skills, a certain way of seeing things. It’s about finding the space where we can have the biggest impact with what we possess within ourselves. From what position can I best add value? At the moment, I think it’s from the CSA role.

Do you have a different set of goals for what you want to achieve this time, compared to when you worked on earlier in your career?

I have wider environmental and ethical goals. I want us to continue moving towards the carbon targets we’ve set. I really believe in the science behind that. The reality is that at the moment there is significant progress being made across many sectors, but there is more to be done in transport. It’s an area we could add more value by focusing on how science can help accelerate the move to lower carbon emissions.

Why do you think transport carbon emissions aren’t falling as fast as in other sectors?

It’s such a complex sector, with so many different modes, so many different operators, and so much bound up in personal decision-making. You don’t have the same control you have in, for example, the electricity sector, where you can put top-down incentives in place and make quick progress because you only have a small number of actors.

Transport is incredibly complicated by comparison and is much more intrinsically connected with people’s personal experience and their choices, and those are really hard to influence. It’s a wicked problem, and it has a lot of challenges that we’re addressing.

Has anything inspired you since taking up the role?

I was keen to see one of DfT’s funded research projects and so I went down to the Live Labs project in Devon.

Live Labs is about taking infrastructure projects (in this case a new road being built) and providing extra funding to further test how those projects could be more sustainable. What they were doing there was fantastic. Things I have been working on in the lab, like biochar and bio-resins (I lead a national research centre that works on those) were actually being deployed in the roads in Devon.

They had also done a great deal of work on biodiversity. In order to build the road, they took the trees and shrubbery and transplanted them to a field belonging to a nearby farmer, in a wet area that wasn’t going to produce much. Trees love wet ground, so it’s a good holding area before they reinstate them by the road. The aim is to achieve a net gain in biodiversity. They also had all the calculations on the carbon impact of the road and how much was due to different components, so decisions can be made about where to achieve the biggest carbon reductions.

What I loved about this project was the interdisciplinary approach. Earlier in my career in the industrial sector, I spent many hours working with lawyers on legal contracts. With this road project in Devon, the team have produced template agreements that allow you to incorporate sustainability elements into legal contracts for construction, something I don’t believe has been successfully done before at this scale.

If you can get this embedded from the start: calculating the carbon, integrating it into the legal contract for building the road, preserving biodiversity and spreading that good practice – that can have phenomenal impact.

Are we still at the beginning of this journey, and is it ultimately an engineering challenge as much as a policy one?

Let’s not say the start. This builds on years of work. You need the policy framework to be right in order to empower people to develop things that can actually make a difference. You then need to deliver it, which is where the industrial and engineering expertise comes in.

The point is that it isn’t enough to simply understand what the problem is.

What’s needed is the ability to actually build something, to construct something, to change the existing system, and that’s what engineering is about. If you only understand how something is working, which is effectively what science tries to do, that isn’t enough on its own. We need people who have that knowledge, but in order to move forward we need more people who can build things.

The rail sector often talks about a declining skills base. Do you see that as a problem across transport more broadly?

Yes, in short. I think there’s a great deal we need to do around the reputation of the industry. We need people to believe that a career in transport is a professional, respectable career, one where they can genuinely add value.

Women in Rail data shows that fewer than 15% of the rail workforce are women, and they held just 1% of C-suite roles as recently as 2021. You chaired a diversity panel early in your career and have championed women in STEM for many years. Has the conversation changed meaningfully in that time?

Yes. Has it moved substantially in the right direction? No.  That 15% figure is not far off the national average.

I think that figure masks a bigger issue – what we see is not enough women progressing through the system. Yes, we need more women in engineering. Yes, we need more women in transport. But if we don’t see leadership at the top, it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade people to take on those roles, because they don’t see role models, people who look like them, in the positions they might aspire to reach in ten years’ time.

Is there anything specific you’re doing for International Women’s Day around this topic?

On International Women’s Day I’ll be at my university. It’s my day at Aston. There will be lots going on, but I would rather work on empowering women and getting more female voices into transport all year round than just on International Women’s Day. What matters is what you do for the other 364 days of the year.

I led the Supergen Hub for fifteen years. When we put together a team, we always monitored diversity, gender, ethnicity and any other protected characteristics people were willing to share with us, in every event we ran, funding competition, in what we awarded, on the management board. There’s a hugely powerful thing about letting people know that you care and that you are consistently monitoring and measuring. If you don’t monitor and measure, you’ve got nothing to work on. It’s all anecdotal. Over 15 years we have more than doubled the proportion of women involved in the project – I think the key things are: awareness of the issue;  consistent attention to gender in all that we do and that grows trust and confidence, which translates into demographic shifts until  eventually targets that once seemed impossible can be reached.

Fifteen years is actually quite a short time when you consider how long-term culture change tends to be. Was it enough time for, say, a student who first engaged with the Hub to see it through to graduation and a professional career?

Absolutely, and we saw exactly that. In our impact report we’ll be citing cases where people who first interacted with our Supergen Hub as students went on to graduate, gain professional positions, and become managing directors of companies started using ideas they first developed in their PhD. Some of them are now working in government, inspired because the Hub and exposure to that policy-industry-academia triangle.

There’s also an important point here: you won’t see the results of what you do instantly. If you have an initiative to attract more women, or any underrepresented group, you can’t expect results in one, two or three years. It has to be in that five, ten, fifteen year phase because it’s about changing culture, changing how people feel about themselves. And where I think we really need to see more impact is at the senior leadership level, which will take decades, because the women who are students today will not be in positions to be CEOs of large companies for another twenty years.

You mentioned monitoring. Has that precision made a difference?

Within Supergen, we measured every event and every competition. Every funding piece we rolled out, we monitored the diversity constantly. That allowed us to look back and see which things we put in place actually made a difference and which didn’t.  You can begin to work out who you’re helping through which measures.

Rail is often seen as the greener alternative to road and aviation. How much of that reputation do you think is deserved, and how much is perception?

It’s absolutely deserved. I spent a lot of my academic career carrying out life cycle assessments, looking across the entire environmental life cycle at the real impact, not just carbon, but also biodiversity and other factors. It’s important to look upstream, at the construction of things, at how products are transported and delivered. Rail is genuinely green for surface transport. The only mode that beats it, in terms of tonnes of carbon per tonne-kilometre of goods moved, is shipping. There’s always room for improvement, of course. We need to focus on the parts of the network that aren’t electrified, and on the older, less efficient engines still in service. But the rail sector in the UK and elsewhere is phenomenally efficient in terms of its carbon credentials.

I love walking out of Birmingham New Street Station in the morning. There’s a display that tells you where your journey is to and from, and if you’ve travelled from, say, Devon to Inverness. It shows you how many kilograms of carbon you’ve saved by taking the train rather than the car. While there is still work to do – it’s a reminder that rail is playing a truly valuable role in delivering a more sustainable transport network in the UK.