STEM Workshops in Bradford

In 1853 the mill owner Titus Salt completed Salts Mill beside the River Aire, the first building of his model village of Saltaire, which was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. After a fire in 1871, Samuel Cunliffe Lister rebuilt Manningham Mills in 1873 as what was then the largest silk factory in the world; its 249-foot chimney can still be seen from most of Bradford. During the Second World War the mill produced parachute silk, flame-proof wool and khaki battledress.

Abraham Sharp (1653 to 1742), born in Little Horton, worked for John Flamsteed at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich from 1688 to 1690 as an assistant and instrument maker, engraving the scale of its great mural arc; in 1699 he calculated pi to 72 decimal places, and a tablet in Bradford Cathedral commemorates him. Edward Appleton, born in Bradford in 1892, showed while Wheatstone Professor of Physics at King's College London that radio waves are reflected by ionised layers of the upper atmosphere, and found the higher layer now named after him, work that won him the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Morrisons, the national supermarket group, has its registered office at Hilmore House in Bradford. The University of Bradford's Institute of Digital and Sustainable Futures houses the Bradford-Renduchintala Centre for Space AI, which applies artificial intelligence to satellite communications, earth observation and satellite navigation. At Bradford Royal Infirmary, the Bradford Institute for Health Research runs Born in Bradford, which began in 2007 and now follows more than 60,000 Bradfordians across its studies. Bradford College, rated Good by Ofsted, has opened Junction Mills, a motor vehicle and engineering building on Thornton Road built to support the growth of electric and hybrid vehicle skills in West Yorkshire.

Bradford College's Master Technician Academy, based at Junction Mills, is a two-year full-time course in which students work on electric vehicles and meet employer partners including Jaguar Land Rover and JCT600, and the college was a West Yorkshire Apprenticeship Awards winner in 2023. The University of Bradford teaches computing and engineering in its School of Computing and Engineering, and pharmacy in its School of Pharmacy, Optometry and Medical Sciences. At Bradford Royal Infirmary, the Bradford Institute for Health Research, home of Born in Bradford, shows that a health career can mean research as well as care. Between college workshops, university laboratories and hospital wards, a Bradford pupil can trace a STEM career from GCSE to employment without leaving the district.