Faces of UCL

[00:00:07]
Michael Spence: Welcome to Faces of UCL, where we uncover many stories from around University College London. I'm Michael Spence, UCL's President and Provost. And I'm excited to bring you conversations with some of the remarkable people who contribute to our vibrant university community. This podcast's a window into the people and the stories that make UCL the special place it is. It's my great privilege to be here today with Doctor Michael Sulu, a lecturer teaching in Biochemical Engineering, but also UCL Envoy for Race Equality, so good to be with you, Mike. How long have you been at UCL?

[00:00:43]
Michael Sulu: I mean, the stock answer is always going to be too long. I came in 2013. I was also an undergrad here. Went away, so I was here from 2000-2004 as undergrad. I did a Master's in York, then went to Birmingham, did my PhD. Stayed in Birmingham to do a postdoc, and then came back to UCL.

[00:01:02]
Michael Spence: What was your PhD about?

[00:01:05]
Michael Sulu: Still in biochemical or chemical engineering, and it was around using bacteria to produce hydrogen as a fuel. It was a tough project to start off with as all PhDs are. I got into it within around my second year, and it was relatively routine, growing bacteria again and again and trying to make them make more by subtly changing the environment they're in, changing the way we feed them. It was nice.

[00:01:31]
Michael Spence: Fascinating. Now, now, when did you discover you have a passion for teaching?

[00:01:36]
Michael Sulu: Probably, then actually, during my PhD. I think I thought I wouldn't have the patience to teach. Then, during your PhD, to earn extra money, you teach, and you get some freedom. It's fun, the experience of helping people understand things, I think is really enriching for the person, and so it's a little bit selfish, obviously but it's enjoyable.

[00:02:02]
Michael Spence: Engineering, it's a interesting educational process, isn't it? We train engineers in professional silos, but lots of them end up working across those silos in one way or another, and in fact, large numbers of them take the problem solving skills that they develop in engineering and work in finance or business or the third sector, or wherever it might be. How do you make engineering education both sufficiently disciplinary specific for the professional bodies, but also enough of an education in the broader sense, to be really worthwhile?

[00:02:38]
Michael Sulu: I think it's something we do really well here at UCL. There's that sense that within our engineering programme, there's some common elements to the first couple of years for everyone. Some of the design stuff is common across the disciplines. Obviously, the maths is, and then they add some extra maths for some disciplines. For me, obviously, it's in chemistry and biochemistry and biology but there is definitely some core elements that you learn as an engineer. We do it really well and there are other places in the UK that also do it really well. Before the Integrated Engineering Programme came, it did feel way more siloed. When I was in undergrad, it felt a lot more siloed than it is.

[00:03:17]
Michael Spence: Tell us about the Integrated Engineering Programme.

[00:03:19]
Michael Sulu: It's been around for maybe seven, eight years. It was a way of bringing all of the engineers together and have a more cohesive or coherent education for all engineers within UCL. It's great. They've got elements that means you can have a minor, so you could be a chemical engineer, have an interest in computer science and do a part of your course in computer science. It's a way of trying to break down disciplines within engineering. I think they're maybe trying to break them down even more.

[00:03:55]
Michael Spence: You've also in engineering thought a lot about leadership education in one way or another.

[00:03:59]
Michael Sulu: Both internally and externally, so within the institution, and also my department, for instance, has a method for teaching external business leaders in the biopharmaceutical sector. It's really super interesting how we are affecting the outside world, basically, not just by the students we send out into the engineering space, but also by the way in which we can teach or train external partners.

[00:04:27]
Michael Spence: Alongside that terrific work in engineering, you've also had university responsibility in the area of race equality. How did that happen?

[00:04:41]
Michael Sulu: It was a genesis also born from engineering, I think, actually. I took up a departmental role, which are now called inclusion leads. I went to a meeting of other inclusion leads, and everyone is trying to solve similar problems. I think one of the things that you learn as an engineer is to ensure that your solution aligns with the problem you had, and some of the solutions that we were coming up with within that space didn't align with the problems we had. I was very vocal about that in that setting. That meant that people then knew who I was and asked me to do more and more.

[00:05:18]
Michael Spence: In particular, what was the mismatch between the problems and the solutions?

[00:05:25]
Michael Sulu: I think sometimes it's actually just about communicating with people. You don't always listen to what the community wants, and then when you're part of that community, it's easier to know what the community wants. Obviously, as an individual, you're never a representative of an entire community. I spoke to a lot of people before attending the meeting, so I had some ideas about what the community would want. A specific example I couldn't give you, but it was very much like that's a great idea. I remember thinking, that's a really good idea. We should do it. It doesn't address the problem, so we're going to have to do something that also addresses the problem.

[00:06:04]
Michael Spence: Race is an interesting thing to think about in the context of universities isn't it? We all assume we're kind of nice in universities, we're all enlightened in one way or another and yet we're also human beings. Human beings make all sorts of assumptions about other people based on arbitrary characteristics, human beings, make all sorts of assumptions about in groups and out groups and define themselves against one another. It strikes me that racism is a problem at UCL as it is everywhere but how do you get an institution like this to really own that?

[00:06:50]
Michael Sulu: It is really difficult. I think that we all have different responses to that in group out group thing and my personal response, is if I have a thought about another group, is to question why I have that thought. I will also never verbalise that thought. What I will do is internalise it, reflect on it, and think about my own intrinsic biases and try and work my way around those. That isn't always the way. I think I remember very vividly talking to a friend of mine who works at Imperial about ways in which you can be binary about academics. One of those ways, I think, is that there are people within the institution. I think it's probably true of every academic institution, maybe of every institution, but academic definitely, whose entire sense of being is revolved around the things that they know and that becomes dangerous in some ways, because it means that it's very hard to challenge their knowledge. It gets entrenched in everything they do within their life. They will find it hard to be introspective and reflect on the things that they think about because they will always believe that their first thought is the correct thought. I don't know if you can manage an institution so that you can create a space where everyone is reflective about the thing they think, the way in which they perceive people or perceive the outside world.

[00:08:18]
Michael Spence: It's really interesting, isn't it? You'd think a university should be a place marked by a kind of epistemic humility. That is where people were constantly asking questions, constantly challenging themselves, constantly rethinking, but the way we structure, in particular, the academic career actually rewards the kind of confidence you're talking about. The way you get promotion is by showing that you're right, and you've made a distinctive contribution. When people show ways in which your theory or your approach doesn't quite work, you look for ways of incorporating those objectives, but unless you're at the end of your career and you're a grand figure and some atheist philosopher who says, "maybe there is a God after all." You don't get rewards in the academic life for saying, "you know, the last three papers I've written were just wrong in X or Y or Z way," or not usually.

[00:09:20]
Michael Sulu: No. Agreed and I think it means that while we do great work, we can't truly be innovative because we're iterating on what we already know rather than trying to innovate and create truly new knowledge.

[00:09:40]
Michael Spence: The really best work involves a kind of courage that gets over that, but it's interesting that you link that to the question about race and our inability to self reflect sometimes about the ways in which we use stereotypes to understand the world, to understand other people, to understand ourselves.

[00:10:07]
Michael Sulu: I guess it's probably the way in which I see the world.

[00:10:12]
Michael Spence: We have to. You have to make a few shortcuts or there'd be too much data to be assimilating all the time, but it's how you hold those shortcuts.

[00:10:21]
Michael Sulu: Absolutely and I think the most successful people are flexible. I'm an engineer, so sometimes it pays to be reductive because you have to make a decision, often a design choice or an engineering decision. It will be informed by things, so you know where you're going and what's constraining it, but to try and simplify the world makes perfect sense, like you say. We do it all the time, but I think you do need to be able to question the assumptions you make whenever you make them, whether it's within engineering or it's on the other topic we're talking about, which is biases, racism. You need to think about why. I genuinely believe the reason people don't is because they have forced themselves to believe that whatever they think is correct, and that's part of their academic intellectual ego, which, to your point means they have literally no humility.

[00:11:20]
Michael Spence: Have you seen the way that internalisation of stereotypes of all kinds can limit student performance, or do you think our students are just so good you don't really notice that kind of thing?

[00:11:32]
Michael Sulu: No, you definitely do. I mean, all of our students are pretty good. What you do get though is, and we don't like to gender things, but you do get women who aren't as confident as they should be, that confidence competence nexus doesn't match, and you also get men who are sometimes too confident for their ability. Again, one of the things I enjoy about teaching is that ability to... I don't bring too confident people down. I try and get their competence to match their confidence. But people who aren't confident enough, really trying to build them up. I mean it's work because you have to do it on an individual basis, but it's really rewarding you see them grow in confidence, and I have had X students maybe who graduated maybe five, six years ago, to be leaders in startups. Who stayed not just because of me but other people in my department also. The encouragement we've given them to do PhDs when they didn't believe they had the capacity to or the ability to. That's probably some of the most rewarding things.

[00:12:43]
Michael Spence: The role as Race Equality Envoy, obviously, part of it is provoking these conversations across the university. What else takes up your time as you do it?

[00:12:58]
Michael Sulu: All the envoys have different, we have our own individual remits that we do. I think over the last few years, I've had a few casework type things, supporting individual, usually PhD students in navigating the institution. One of the things that has happened with the growth of the envoy number is that now all of the equality groups work together more. It's a bit like engineering. We talked about silos. We were very siloed, I think. There was some intersectionality within gender and race, but now I think we get together and have chats about individual group needs and how we can work together to help support each other. It became very apparent to me that working together would mean we'd get more change. There have been things around... you know that we had that commitment to 50 Black academics. I mean, sadly, we fell short of, but the question used to arise, why 50, and why Black? The real reason, I think, is one, because they're the most minoritized, but also, if we find a way to resolve that issue, it should be beneficial for all people. Making these institutions in one way more inclusive, but keeping the view that it should be just generally more inclusive.

[00:14:19]
Michael Spence: You grew up in this country?

[00:14:21]
Michael Sulu: Yeah.

[00:14:23]
Michael Spence: Have the experience of being Black British?

[00:14:24]
Michael Sulu: Yeah.

[00:14:27]
Michael Spence: There are lots of people who identify as belonging to different ethnicities and races and having different backgrounds at UCL. How do you think and work across that variety of experience? For example, one of the things that often takes my breath away is the way I hear people talk about our 'Chinese students' as if this very large group of people who come from often culturally very different backgrounds and have different stories and whatever are some homogeneous mass or with a particular set of characteristics. How do you get into the experience of people with other racialized or identities across the institution?

[00:15:11]
Michael Sulu: I grew up in a small town in East Sussex. In my town I went to school with 1,500 students. There were probably 15 of those who weren't white. I always described myself as being socialised very white, which means that if you come into an institution like this, which is also quite white it's not a shock to me. Whereas I have relatives that grew up in South London who would hate how white UCL is. So that's part of it, understanding that even within identities there's just a huge range of different experiences. Then the rest of it comes from one of the reasons why I do the role. Which is I have the ability to talk to people and listen to people across the institution and find out about their experiences. I learned so much from other people. I was in the one of the race equality charter mark listening sessions a couple of weeks ago, and a Chinese student said that they wished that there were more ways for them to interact with other students. My narrow view was that for cultural reasons, they group together. Also for educational reasons, they can help each other learn. You see groups within engineering that have different abilities with English, and then you get the better English teaching the less good English. They all rise together. I thought it was a choice rather than it being a function of the fact that the institution doesn't create ways for them to interact with others more. I mean, we always are a little bit hesitant of doing any social engineering, but there probably does need to be ways in which students get to mix more than they currently do. To answer your question, though it is actually just listening to people. Talking to people, listening to what they have. I've always been, apart from today, where I'm talking a lot, a proponent of the fact that you should listen more than you talk. You learned so much from other people. Whether it be academic or just around the ways in which people exist within the institution.

[00:17:19]
Michael Spence: Listening, humility, cannot bear to kill and sometimes the most important things are also the most difficult. Tell us about the inter research programme.

[00:17:33]
Michael Sulu: It's one of my, pet projects, I guess, I think it's wonderful. It's a year-long programme, which ends with an eight-week research placement for students. It's all social mobility and race and ethnicity focus, so all the students on it from a lower social class, as defined by the ways which we measure that at UCL, but also a large proportion of them, usually 70%-80%, will be racially ethnically minoritized. We give them skills, like mentors, coaches, to help them learn about the application for a PhD process, and then at the end of the programme, we support them further if they want to do a PhD. It's important for us that the success criteria is that they have more knowledge about whether or not they want to do it rather than than just trying to funnel them into doing PhDs. The way in which we pioneered is the training element around it, which is a whole year process, but also, we've brought in students from across the country. All we said was, you need to have a residence in London. We've had students from Glasgow, we've had students from Bath, and most institutions, people have now started to copy it, but most institutions will do the same for their own students and not be as - I don't know what the word is - generous - as to bring in people. It's an expensive programme to bring in people and understand that to be able to support students across the sector is important, so I was super proud to work on it. We're looking to grow it if we can. We're trying to get some more funding, make it more longitudinal, so students get support from undergrad all the way through to post-doc. There's a few things around changing institutional culture that we've talked about already, and trying to use the training we give the staff in this programme to try and enable that change. We're really fortunate we've got some really good evaluation that means we get to see where the gaps in the programme are and then try and fill those gaps. Again, it comes down to being a little bit humble about what you've achieved and understanding that you can always do better. Which might case that iterative improvement is probably part of the engineering mindset.

[00:19:58]
Michael Spence: Notwithstanding that we're pushing humility and that you can always do better. Do you have any examples so far of people who've been through the programme where you can see that it's made a difference in their confidence or in the career outcomes for them or their capacity to engage in research?

[00:20:16]
Michael Sulu: Absolutely. I go to some of our alumni events when I can. We have an alumni programme which has a level of support for the sudents who've been through the programme, and genuinely met a few students whose experience of academia was so bad that the programme, essentially kept them in academia, and super emotional stories about them going to other institutions, having a horrible time, leaving education altogether, and then realising there are different ways to experience universities by virtue of the fact that we have lovely people here who are kind and generous. Then understanding how they should find those people elsewhere if they need to.

[00:21:04]
Michael Spence: You're a teacher and a pedagogue, you're a worker for race equality and educational innovator into research, but you're also a brewer. It's an unusual combination.

[00:21:22]
Michael Sulu: I mean I'm a biochemical engineer. It's a biological process that starts off with fermentation? Usually, for in our department, focuses on pharmaceuticals, antibodies, vaccines, that kind of thing. We do make other things, but we have a big biopharma focus, but the process is similar to start off with when you're brewing beer. I have always said it is easy to make a drinkable beer. It's hard to make a very good one, but the process is just using some yeast, feeding it right, giving it the right environment, and at the end of it, all the outputs, the rest of the process is done in your body, rather than the machines, is what we would use, so it's also fun. We have just brought a new brewery, which we're going to be installing, I think over the summer, and a micro distillery, too, so we should be I'm trying to make some spirits, as well.

[00:22:17]
Michael Spence: Where is this Brewery?

[00:22:18]
Michael Sulu: It's going to be in UCL East. It is expensive, but a fun project. We'll integrate it into teaching. We'll do some external training as well, and it'll become also part time part of the Institute of Making that they have a UCL East, so students and staff can be trained how to use it and make their own alcohol or kombucha, anything that requires brewing. Distilling might be a little bit harder to do because of the licencing and is also a little bit dangerous. We want it to be open access as much as possible, as well as to use it for teaching.

[00:22:53]
Michael Spence: You've been at UCL for a while. There must be something that keeps you here. What do you value about UCL?

[00:23:00]
Michael Sulu: It's a really good question. I was talking to someone about this just the other day, and it's the people. At times we've talked about sometimes the environment within UCL doesn't feel great for specific reasons, but my home department has always been wonderful, so that would keep me here. We're in a time now when UCL feels good as a whole. Where would I go? Imperial? No, but if we're honest, it's also partly because we're so multidisciplinary. Especially with the Grand Challenges, we get to be more interdisciplinary. There are times probably when we're also trans disciplinary, but I like the fact that I can go into a meeting, and it'll be full of people from the Slade or I can have sit down discussion with someone who's a social scientist and learn things from them and see how in some ways, we're different, but in many ways we're the same.

[00:24:03]
Michael Spence: If there's something that you would like staff across the university to understand about the experience of our Black British students, and if there's something that you'd like to see, what is it?

[00:24:17]
Michael Sulu: If I reflect on myself. I had fully internalised that sense that you get taught as a Black British boy and girl, when you're young, that you'll have to work twice as hard to do as well. It's that sense of the meritocracy, I think, which creeps in, which makes you believe that all achievements are individual, and the reason that I'm not doing as well is because I'm not working hard enough. That, I think leads you to not ask for help when you should do. I think that I would want for all staff or students to understand that there are people who will help you and that you can ask for help. Especially with researchers, I tell everyone, you need to get a mentor, but not just one mentor, you should get many mentors. I believe it takes a village, the proverbial village. That would be the one thing that I would like to see. I don't know how you would qualify that but I just want people to understand that essentially that people are here to help you, and you can ask for help, and it's okay to ask for help.

[00:25:27]
Michael Spence: I think this message about both reaching out for support, but also making it clear that support is available, is really important.

[00:25:35]
Michael Sulu: I loved them, so I also attended some of the Black At UCL events that's run by the Student Success Team, and that environment for me was really really heartwarming. To see the openness and the vulnerability of the students and the community they've created was really nice. I think that you add that to that sense of the willingness to seek support and willingness to give support, and we'll have a system within the institution that allows Black students to thrive. Then we need to apply to everyone.

[00:26:08]
Michael Spence: Exactly. Well, look, thank you so much for the conversation today, but in particular, for all that you do not only for biochemical engineering, but for the university more generally. I'm not quite sure how you fit it all in, but hats off to you, and thanks very much for having this chat today, Michael.

[00:26:24]
Michael Sulu: Thank you for the chat.

[00:26:25]
Michael Spence: Appreciate that. Join us next on Faces of UCL as we sit down with our Student Union President Goksu Danaci to hear about her journey into student leadership and what it's like to try and be a channel and a face for the voice of over 50,000 students.