Despite soaring summer temperatures, the Department’s celebration of International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) this year attracted around 70 attendees to hear presentations from Department researchers and talks from external speakers. The afternoon’s activities brought together students, researchers, academics, and industry partners to celebrate the achievements and contributions of women in engineering. Researchers presented cutting-edge work, while representatives from Oracle, Infleqtion, Prysmian, and PwC shared insights into career opportunities across a broad range of engineering and technology disciplines.
Professor of Civil Engineering Deborah Greaves shared her career journey from civil engineering to specialising in fluid‑structure computational dynamics. She noted that women made up just 5% of the engineering workforce in the 1980s, compared with around 16% today, highlighting the progress that has been made while emphasising that there is still much work to do. Postgraduate students Maike Lenz (Adaptive Optics), Kayla Patel (Applied Digital Health) and Yiming Chen (Visual Geometry Group) presented highlights from their work.
The keynote speaker, Yasmin Ali, engineer and author, spoke about her career in the energy sector, from growing up in Baghdad where energy was scarce, to working in oil and gas and offshore rigs, and later transitioning into sustainable energy and improving domestic heat efficiency. She encouraged young female engineers to face challenges directly and pursue solutions rather than waiting for them to appear.
