Nicholas Moisciwitsch, who joined the IEE as Head of Engineering Policy last month, is most definitely not everybody's idea of the typical English civil servant. In contrast to the Machiavellian, Oxbridge-educated classicist of the popular imagination, Moiseiwitsch is a genial, Southampton-trained engineer, with an unfeigned enthusiasm for the intricacies of public administration. Educated at the Methodist College, Belfast, Moiseiwitsch was inspired to study engineering by the role model of Ms sister's husband: 'a proper engineer who knew what he was doing'. He graduated in 1990, with a B.Eng in Electronic Engineering, and then stayed on at Southampton to do research in silicon microelectronics-completing his PhD in 1994 and spending the next four years as an EPSRC-funded research assistant. Doing research and learning how to run a dean room was 'great fun', but at the end of his second EPSRC research project Moiseiwitsch started to look round to see what else he could do. The ideal would have been 'research in an industrial setting', but contractions and take-overs in the UK semiconductor industry made this an uncertain long-term prospect, and he eventually opted for the civil service, joining the Department of Trade and Industry as a science and engineering Fast Stream entrant in January 1998.
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