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Alan Reece at the controls of a digger

Dr Alan Reece

Dr Reece left his readership in Agricultural Engineering at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1980s to focus on invention.

His innovative designs include a highly efficient undersea plough, which greatly reduced the cost of installing the cables and pipelines vital for the telecoms and oil industries, amongst others, beyond the reach of trawler dragnets.

Since then, his companies have brought over £400 million of business to Tyneside, employing several hundred people.

He has made substantial charitable donations to numerous educational and community projects in the Tyneside region. His company Pearson Engineering Ltd has also supported humanitarian organisations who work to remove land mines in former war zones.

More recently, they were awarded the world's first contract for a mining machine designed to operate in extremely deep water.

Dr Reece is still passionately concerned with engineering and manufacturing. In 2006 he published a paper arguing that the decline in manufacturing in the UK has led to a decline in the demand for highly-paid technologists, which is in turn partially responsible for current problems in the teaching of maths and the sciences.