Keynote speaker
Roma Agrawal MBE
Roma Agrawal MBE is a structural engineer and author with a physics degree. She has designed bridges, skyscrapers (including The Shard) and sculptures with signature architects. Roma has given lectures to thousands at universities, schools and organisations; has presented numerous TV shows; and hosts her own podcast, Building Stories. Her first book, BUILT (2018) won an AAAS science book award and has been translated into eight languages. Roma is passionate about promoting engineering and technical careers to young people, particularly those from minoritized groups, and has won international awards for her technical prowess and for her advocacy for the profession, including the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering’s Rooke Award. She was appointed an MBE in 2018 for services to engineering.
Nuts & bolts: Stories from engineering
As an engineer, Roma loves breaking complex things down into their elements, and then exploring how these elements came to be and their impact on our world. In this talk, Roma presents a fresh take on some of the challenges in the workplace today. She will relate the story of how springs revolutionised timekeeping to question what time is and how we use it. Roma will share why her daughter wouldn’t exist without the seminal work of an Islamic scientist from a thousand years ago, and get the audience thinking about whose shoulders they are standing on, and how best to engage them. She will reveal the story of engineer Emily Roebling to explore the barriers that people from minoritised groups face and how to get your messages across. As an immigrant and woman of colour working in engineering, Roma’s unique perspective will inspire you to think about familiar things in a new way.
University of Glasgow
Dr Tania Wallis
Improving the cybersecurity of Critical National Infrastructure
Tania Wallis is a researcher of supply chain cybersecurity, across the energy, rail, aviation and water sectors, at the University of Glasgow. She is facilitating collaborations with industry and academia, to co-produce cybersecurity guidance for critical infrastructure and Co-Leads a Supply Chain Expert Group with attention on the cybersecurity of Operational Technology environments. A Chartered Engineer, she previously worked as a systems engineer in the telecoms sector integrating people, processes and technology in the design and implementation of network operations centres.
Heriot-Watt University
Dr Michael Crichton
Acoustic sensor for clinical impact / cross-institutional collaboration
Michael Crichton is an Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University, where he runs the Soft Tissue and Biomedical Devices Laboratory (STABD Lab). His research interests lie in understanding how disease changes the material behaviour of biological tissues, and how we exploit these for innovative medical technologies.
Michael’s background is multidisciplinary with an undergraduate degree in Aeronautical Engineering, followed by a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Queensland. There he worked on a microneedle vaccine technology which led to a number of patents which were licenced to Vaxxas, a company established with $15m funding to commercialise this technology. Joining Vaxxas, Michael worked on a variety of projects and led device engineering aspects. He returned to academia and in 2017 joined Heriot-Watt University, where he is leading research on tissue (skin and organ) sensors, mechanobiology and other medical microdevices. He loves the challenges and benefits from cross-sector multidisciplinary research and is working to commercialise his medical technologies. His work in wound healing sensors is now being spun out, supported by a HWU IAA and the Scottish Enterprise High Growth Spinout Programme.
University of Strathclyde
Dr Fiona Sillars
From redundancy to recirculation in the wind industry
Fiona Sillars is Team Lead of the Advanced Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Strathclyde. An expert in materials chemistry, degradation behaviour, performance to mechanical loading and fatigue life, Dr Sillars has delivered 100+ interdisciplinary research projects since 2012. Her research includes EPSRC-funded programmes: SUPERGEN (energy storage for electric vehicles), SPECIFIC (buildings as power stations) for Tata Steel and the Solar Soldier (wearable power generation) for the MoD.
She was UK representative with the European Energy Researchers Alliance (EERA) for Energy Storage, and granted a studentship on ‘Net Zero Transition: Evaluation of Repurposed Pipeline Materials in Hydrogen Environments’. She leads the Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) on Sustainable Product Development with Trtl® and is part of the academic team for the KTP on Wind Turbine Decommissioning with Renewable Parts Ltd. Her work on “From Redundancy to Recirculation” was recognised at the COP26 Images of Innovations and winner of the EPSRC Net Zero Photography Competition 2022.
University of St Andrews
Professor Eli Zysman-Colman
Sustainable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance OLEDs
Eli Zysman-Colman leads a group focussed on developing innovative solutions through expertise in luminophores for energy-efficient visual displays and flat panel lighting based on organic light emitting diode (OLED). He is the Founder and CEO of SolOLED which delivers sustainable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance OLEDs. As Director of Impact and Innovation in the School of Chemistry, Eli is at the interface between world-leading research and generating positive impact through collaboration, entrepreneurship and exploration.
University of Edinburgh
Dr Mark Naylor
Sounding out the river: Monitoring and modelling sediment transport for risk management
Dr Mark Naylor is a Reader in Computational Geoscience and Hazard Research in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. This project combines his love of learning about physical processes and granular materials, with seismology, and underwater sound analysis to understand the transport of coarse sediment within rivers. This is challenging because it is difficult to understand what is happening on the bed of a river during flood events. Yet the transport of bedload poses risks to infrastructure and is an indicator of river health, and bedload is an important habitat for key species. This talk will look at how we are working with stakeholders to translate new monitoring technologies to inform on river management, river rewilding and help anticipate potential effects of changing climate extremes. In this project, he is collaborating with Dr Maggie Creed (University of Glasgow), who is expert in Engineering-focussed models of flooding and sediment transport on rivers.