SAVILE SCIENCE: THE SCIENCE OF POSITIONING, NAVIGATION AND TIMING IN THE 21ST CENTURY – DR RAMSEY FARAGHER TALK. CHAIRED BY SAVILIAN CLIFF COLLIS.

We depend on positioning, navigation and timing systems every day, and modern society is as critically dependent on these technologies as we are on electricity and clean water. In this talk Dr Faragher will explain some of the most fascinating aspects of this branch of science, from how GPS is one of our greatest achievements as a civilisation, to how submarines can navigate underwater for months using just gravity, and why some of the ways in which we have unintentionally smashed things into Mars are as impressive as they were expensive.

Dr Ramsey Faragher is the Director, and a Fellow, of the Royal Institute of Navigation, and also a Fellow of Queens’ College, at the University of Cambridge. He holds dozens of granted patents across more than 40 patent families and has worked on the navigation systems of a variety of systems across land, air, sea, and even Mars. Ramsey is the inventor of the Supercorrelation synthetic aperture processing technique for radio positioning systems and has been the recipient of numerous awards from IEEE, RIN, IOP and ION including the ION Samual Burka and Per Enge awards, the IOP Dennis Gabor Medal, and the Royal Institute of Navigation’s highest accolade, the Harold Spencer-Jones Gold Medal.

Cliff Collis has a wide background in science with a doctorate in fish neurophysiology and researching in and teaching physiology and biochemistry at UCL and Kings College London. He also worked as a communication specialist doing knowledge/issue management in Roche drug development and finally was the professional registers and training manager at the Royal Society of Biology. He has always been passionate about promoting interest and understanding in science and was very pleased to be able to continue to do this in Savile Science, where he has organised talks on such diverse topics as Mars rovers, the psychological benefits of music, microplastic pollution and cyber security. Several members have given talks as well, and members are invited to offer suitable talks or suggest speakers.