Dr Keith Seffen, of the Advanced Structures Group, has been awarded a Visiting Professorship at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie, part of the prestigious Sorbonne Group in Paris. In recent years he has developed a wider and more general understanding of how to make engineering structures change shape reliably, reversibly and safely, with application to "morphing" structures concepts in the aerospace and transportation industries. Dr Seffen will be working with colleagues later this summer in the Institute Jean Le Rond d'Alembert on the problem of how natural structures change shape during growth, in order to better understand the role of mechanical influences upon such behaviour.