Congratulations to Andy Morris, who heads up NPL North based at the 3M BIC, on being an awarded an MBE in the recent Queen’s birthday honours.

Andy was presented with the MBE for his services, which also included the wider NPL North team, for the supply and manufacture of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Andy provided advice and support to a lot of organisations that wanted to manufacture PPE, especially with regards to standards and testing. In particular, he helped organisations that were in the early stages of moving towards the manufacture of PPE.

As a team, NPL North helped organisations to check and refine designs to ensure they would meet relevant standards and then helped them in their applications for testing by notified bodies.

More recently the team developed a testing capability to help manufacturers in the early phases of their design and manufacturing processes to help to evaluate novel designs and materials. The NPL North team provided a great deal of the input to these projects, but there was also plenty of support from NPL colleagues across the UK.

The last few months have been extremely busy for NPL North. The team has continued to provide services and support to businesses throughout the lockdown period. In particular, its Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) team have been very busy on PPE related projects.

On finding he had been awarded the MBE, Andy said: “I was surprised at first and I also felt very grateful that someone had thought that my work was worthy enough for an award such as this. The award is based on a team effort from NPL North and colleagues around NPL, so all involved should feel that they have a share in this. Right now, I am just happy to continue with the valuable work that myself and my team are doing and look forward to getting back to a more permanent presence in the 3M BIC again, hopefully in the not too distant future.”

The NPL North team are currently investigating the digitisation of measurement systems to provide more immediate useful data to businesses that would need that data. They want to be able to provide information from these systems that will be useful for manufacturers during their product design and manufacture processes to allow them to optimise their processes and gain a good understanding of the quality of their products.