Planetary Perspectives: Geraint (Taff) Morgan
Geraint (Taff) Morgan, Professor in Analytical Chemistry at the University of Southampton (UK), worked on the Rosetta and Beagle2 missions and has spent the last 32 years translating multi-disciplinary know-how from planetary missions to solving challenges back on Earth.
Read article in the fully formatted PDF of the Europlanet Magazine.
What has been your career path to your current position?
I did a degree and then a PhD in chemistry at the University of Leicester. My PhD was sponsored by a US company, and that’s where I learned to use gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and also design new experimental setups. In 1993, I started a postdoc working with Prof Colin Pillinger at The Open University (OU) and, in hindsight, that was my first experience of the translation of space technology to terrestrial applications.
Having previously developed a novel mass spectrometer for the analysis of water in meteorites, our group developed a Gas Chromatograph-Isotope Ratio-Mass Spectrometer (GC-IR-MS) and we reduced the sample size down many orders of magnitude. This allowed us to use isotopes of methane to help fingerprint and constrain the budget of global warming gases released by different sources around the world, like landfills, cattle and peat bogs. We even analysed Antarctic ice cores and termite farts from Cameroon, which attracted some media attention!
In 1995, I joined Colin’s team to help design, build and test the Ptolemy instrument, which was a miniature GC-IR-MS for the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. We took a lab instrument that was used to analyse meteorite samples and shrank it from the size of a family car to the size of a shoe box. We delivered Ptolemy in September 2001 and it was the very first thing mounted on Rosetta’s Philae lander. Rosetta launched in 2004 and reached comet 67P/Churyomov-Gerasimenko in October 2014.
Along with the other members of the team, I was in the lander control centre as Philae bounced across the surface of the comet. We were lucky, because we’d actually put a “sniffing” mode into the program for Ptolemy, so whilst everybody else was worried that Philae was flying off into space, we received data on dust thrown up after the first bounce. We had meetings at midnight to redesign the whole mission, because we landed under a cliff and we had about a third of the power that we were expecting, but it was a good example of how Europeans can work together to make decisions in the best interest of science. The wonderful experience was exhausting yet exhilarating – and ultimately very satisfying!
I was also a team member on the Beagle2 mission, which launched in June of 2003 but sadly, didn’t “bark” on landing on Christmas Day 2003. In 2015, the high-resolution imager on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission spotted what we believe is the lander on the surface of Mars. It looks like the final solar panel didn’t open, and the radio was hidden underneath. So Beagle2 landed and may actually have found life on Mars – it just couldn’t communicate with us. In about 2006, the Head of School, Prof Ian Wright, and I agreed that I should explore how we might use the multidisciplinary skillset and expertise of our team to look at delivering solutions for terrestrial challenges.
I think the best example of this was developing an air monitoring system for BAe Systems and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which will now be deployed to measure the air quality inside UK submarines. A submarine is a big metal tube that makes its own air and, obviously, you have to ensure that the air is safe to breathe for the 100-plus people on board. Our prototype system measured over 40 gases continuously and provided different types of alarms to allow the operators to make real-time decisions.
Having successfully trialled our system on a submarine, we helped select the UK company for the £15 million order with the MoD to supply the system. This has enabled a UKbased capability and broke a 30-year monopoly on the use of air monitoring systems from America in the NATO fleet. At least 13 jobs have beencreated in that company, and delivery and through-life servicing of the system will now account for 50% of its business going forward until 2060.
Since then, I have looked at a range of applications of high-end gas chromatography techniques for distilled spirits, including Scottish, English and Welsh whiskies. We’re helping clients to protect their brands, but also to improve production. In addition, we’re working with food and flavour companies to develop new ways of making targeted compounds or new products, and we’re working with car manufacturers to sniff out regulated compounds in vehicle interiors. As volatile organic compounds can be indicative of disease, we’re also looking at healthcare diagnostics, and we have a Cancer Research UK project running with academic partners at Queen Mary University of London and clinical partners at the University of Liverpool.
Now, after 31.5 years at The OU, I’ve just moved to Southampton University, where I have a professorship in analytical chemistry, with a focus on knowledge exchange and enterprise.
How do you define an opportunity (as opposed to an idea) and what are the first steps you would take towards developing a product?
You have to “kiss a lot of frogs” – try many things – but you also have to know when to walk away as well. You need the customer to be very clear about the problem they want to solve and why they think the solution is what you have to offer. Quite often, because customers aren’t experts in your area, they don’t necessarily know what the right answer is.
The big questions I always ask first are: ‘What’s the problem you want us to solve?’ and ‘What do you want to measure and where do you want to do it?’ The next questions are: ‘What’s the budget?’ and ‘What’s the time scale?’
Usually, to get those questions answered, you need to establish a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), because the customer needs to be able to tell you their pain points with the security of a confidentiality agreement.
Before entering discussions you will probably need an independent due diligence assessment (for instance, most universities won’t work with tobacco companies because you can’t get charity funding afterwards) and you also need to make sure that your potential customer has the financial wherewithal to be able to pay you at the end of the contract.
The follow-up questions usually all relate to the physical and environmental constraints of the design solution, as well as the analytical performance and operational criteria. So things like: ‘What are the maximum dimensions,and the mass, power and energy budgets? What are the shock and vibration loads? What are the minimum and maximum operating and non-operating temperatures? How long should it take between analysis and getting the result?’
Hopefully, that then allows you to evaluate whether or not the problem is solvable by you. If you go through that iterative process, you will be able to know if it’s a viable project.
What are the most important things to consider when approaching a potential commercial partner?
I always try to see myself from the customer’s perspective. I base it on the Trust Equation: ‘Am I credible? Am I reliable? Am I good to work with?’ And then the biggest, most important one is: ‘Do I trust the motives of the other party and do they trust mine?’
Working with a company is about building relationships. Ideally, you scale up: you start with a small project, you deliver, you’re successful, you then move on to a bigger project. There are no shortcuts: a company will only spend money if you’re solving a problem or you’re helping them make more money than they would do otherwise.
Essentially, in making an initial pitch and in building the trust with a new potential customer, you need to think about and articulate why you want to work with a commercial partner, why you are the person that they should come to, and what the benefits will be to you as an academic and to your institution.
What kind of funding sources are out there for people looking to develop spin-out technologies or work with industry in other ways?
There are many ways of engaging with industry. The lowest cost and the shortest time-frame is through consultancy, where you are using your knowledge of your domain and your expertise to provide feedback on whatever question the customer has. There’s also contract research, where a customer will provide you with samples or data for analysis.
In terms of spin-outs, then different organisations may have completely different approaches and appetites for risk and levels of enagagement. For example, if your university believes in taking calculated risks, it may help you develop a business model and, following an evaluation of the business model, put some funding into a spin-out. For that, it would probably also take an equity share in the company, so it would own a small part of the company, and have somebody on your executive board as well.
If you are a start-up, rather than a spin-out, there are over 20 European Space Agency Business Incubation Centres (ESA BICs) around Europe. Entrepreneurs with a technology or an application related to space can apply for support through several rounds a year. As well as funding, ESA BICs also provide office and lab space, access to the technology that is present on ESA campuses (e.g. free use of workshop time), Intellectual Property (IP) support, training and mentoring. Government bodies (such as Innovate UK) can also provide support for startups and businesses and, I’m sure, there’ll be similar processes in different parts of Europe. I have had two companies go through ESA BIC (Harwell) and I have greatly benefited from the experience.
In countries that are part of ESA, and put money into ESA, quite often there are schemes whereby ESA puts money back into those countries to develop certain technologies. For instance, my company is in the process of negotiating with a European company over how our technology can feed into their nation’s space programme. So there are many different schemes that you can look out for.
project that you’ve been involved in, or the one that you’re most proud of?
In terms of the most surprising: I received a phone call from a pest controller saying he was getting called in by hotels to look for bed bugs. Bed bugs communicate using smell, and the pest controller could smell if they were present at any significant level. We ended up developing a system to detect bed bugs, and we had a strap line: ‘We’ll find them before they find you.’ Unfortunately, as far as the hotels were concerned, it was cheaper for them to deal with an outbreak than it was for them to effectively screen every hotel room daily. So sadly, whilst it was a good idea and we produced the solution, the market wasn’t quite ready for it.
In terms of the most proud: I think that has to be the submarine monitoring system. That is helping to protect the UK’s national security and, more importantly, protect the lives of the submariners who spend three months underwater protecting us all.
What would you say you learned or gained from your involvement in the Beagle 2 and the Rosetta missions?
I think the main thing I learned from Colin and Ian was: ‘Don’t be afraid to try it. Just go for it.’
Colin and Ian were also very good at building teams of people, and they were very loyal to those teams. Once you’d proved your value, then you were retained. And that’s something that I’ve tried to follow in my own teams. If you want to solve a complex problem, you need many different skillsets and perspectives. You’ll never produce a perfect solution, but you will at least get to an optimised solution based on what you are trying to measure and, most importantly, the operational constraints. If you’ve only got five kilogrammes to go to a comet, then it’s never going to be as good as a car-sized instrument in the lab. It’s about doing what you can, building teams and respecting that everybody is making a valuable contribution. When you think of how many people it took to land on a comet, you are probably talking about 10,000 people across Europe, allowing us to do one series of measurements for just a few minutes.
With Beagle2, we spent a lot of time developing the gas analysis package solution, but it didn’t get a chance to deliver. However, because we’d solved many technical challenges in building that system, and we were open to transferring those solutions, we found other opportunities elsewhere. Indeed, my colleagues at The OU are in the process of developing solutions for future lunar missions, building on the legacy of both Rosetta and Beagle2.
What are the main challenges or benefits from having a foot in both academia and industry?
There are lots of things that you can get support for in a university. However, working in academia or within a big organisation can come with very fixed processes and procedures, not all of which are optimised for knowledge exchange. In a company, if you are the director, you make your own decisions. However, you are also responsible – all the safety nets that you had in the university are no longer there – and all it’s down to you. So both scenarios have positives and negatives.
What final piece of advice would you give?
The key thing is to fully understand what the problem is that you are solving for someone. Also, knowledge exchange is a contact sport: you’ve got to get yourself out there, through webinars, presentations, conferences or LinkedIn – by whatever means. It is like snowball rolling down the hill: as you build your network and customer base, then they themselves start to generate new opportunities for you, acting as ambassadors, and opportunities grow. However, it does take time to build up that momentum and so be patient and keep going.
Find out more:
- Taff Morgan’s LinkedIn page
- University of Southampton Group Page
