This year’s Oundle Lecture was delivered by Alice Kan (L 1997), a mechanical engineer. Her career path began after an Oundle teacher encouraged her to study engineering. After university she worked for AstraZeneca for thirteen years, and since then she and her husband (also an engineer) have launched their own business. Her role in the Covid-19 vaccine rollout prompted the Royal Academy of Engineering to name her as an inspirational role model and even commissioned a statue of her, the first of a living engineer, as a testament to her contributions and the profession’s role in society.
She is now contributing to Sabin Vaccine Institute’s efforts to tackle two of the world’s deadliest diseases, Ebola and Marburg. Last year her team worked with the Rwandan government and WHO to deal with an outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus disease. As part of a phase 2 open-label clinical trial, they delivered the vaccine within a week. Within nine days, the first people had been vaccinated.
During the pandemic, she played a crucial role in manufacturing the first vials of the COVID-19 vaccine, for which she received an award for innovation from the Women’s Engineering Society.
She described how, following an urgent government directive, her team was tasked with the seemingly impossible to set up a sterile, validated vaccine production line in just six weeks, a process that typically takes two years. What followed was a rollercoaster of urgency, collaboration, and absolute focus. She led the effort to batch produce the vaccine, manufacture sterile vaccine vials, fill at speed and rethink packaging to meet urgent timelines. The line filled 200 vials a minute, each one subjected to intense scrutiny through high-speed camera inspections.
In just months, they went from “no product, no process, no team” to hosting then Prime Minister Boris Johnson as the first vials came off the line.
But while vaccine production was a triumph of engineering speed and determination, the fight for equity in her profession has been far longer and more personal. Her experiences reveal the subtle, yet damaging assumptions women still face in STEM careers. Despite her achievements, she is often asked who the boss is, assumed to be the note-taker, or overlooked in favour of male colleagues repeating her ideas.
She recalled a moment when, after leading a complex equipment installation at AstraZeneca, a contractor said, “No, seriously, who’s in charge?” She realised the need to reply with disarming but direct questions that prompt reflection. “What did you mean by that?” became her go-to phrase, helping challenge bias without confrontation.
Even after a 25-year career in engineering, Alice has often found herself as the only woman in the room. Her work may have started in sterile manufacturing lines, but it now reaches far into efforts to retain women in engineering, one of the most underrepresented yet critically needed demographics in the industry.
Noting that women in engineering peaked at just under 18% in 2021, and have since dropped to around 16%, she’s concerned about the steady attrition, especially among women aged 35–44.
Determined to reverse this trend, she has applied for a Churchill Fellowship to study how countries like New Zealand, Norway, and Iceland have created cultures that retain women in engineering. New Zealand, for instance, has seen female participation rise from 15% to 37% in a decade through targeted workplace inclusion policies.
She believes that when you create environments where women thrive, everyone benefits. Diversity is not just a moral imperative; it is a business one. Companies with diverse teams outperform less diverse ones by at least 15%, and when solving global problems like climate change or pandemics, a range of perspectives leads to stronger, more adaptable solutions.
Whether it is calmly addressing bias, communicating critical vaccine data to government, or working with WHO to deliver the Marburg virus vaccine to Rwanda in record time, Alice shows that leadership in engineering means much more than technical know-how.
“What did you mean by that?” might seem like a small question, but in the right moment, it can open minds, challenge prejudice, and create space for better conversations. It is the combination of technical excellence and human empathy that drives true progress.
Alice says if we want to build a future where diverse teams solve the world’s toughest problems, we will need more people, especially women, asking just that.
