Chemengers make Top 50 Women In Engineering

FOUR members of IChemE have been named on the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) Top 50 Influential Women in Engineering List 2016 – Dame Judith Hackett, Dame Sue Ion, Allie MacAdam and Lynn Gladden.

The list was compiled by WES in collaboration with the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK to coincide with National Women in Engineering Day (NWED) on 23 June. The list was chosen from almost 900 nominations by an expert panel. It includes representatives from all major engineering disciplines, and from academia and the business world.

Dame Judith is an IChemE Fellow and was its president in 2014. She is still very active in IChemE, promoting engineering and diversity. She is the former chair of Great Britain’s Health and Safety Executive, a position she held for eight years, and is now the chair of EEF – The Manufacturers’ Organisation. She spent 23 years in industry before moving on to represent various professional institutions.

“I congratulate WES on this initiative. It is great to see such a diverse list of the top 50 Women in Engineering and I am delighted to have been named as one of them. Close to 900 women were nominated originally and that too tells a very encouraging story about the growing community of women engineers and role models in the UK,” she said.

Dame Sue, a nuclear expert, is an Honorary Fellow of IChemE. She chairs the Nuclear Innovation and Research Advisory board and was a keynote speaker at IChemE’s Sustainable Nuclear Energy Conference (SNEC) in 2014. She is a regular on UK television and radio programmes to discuss engineering and the nuclear industry, and contributes to the Financial Times.

MacAdam, a Chartered Member of IChemE and a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), is a chemical engineering graduate from the University of Bradford. She is now the managing director of infrastructure, Europe and Africa at Bechtel, and has worked on some major UK engineering projects, including the High Speed 1 rail networks and the London Crossrail projects.

Gladden is the Shell professor of chemical engineering and vice-chancellor of research at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is a Fellow of IChemE, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society. In her research, she develops magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques for use in areas such as oil recovery and pharmaceuticals. She has won many awards for her work and in 2009 was awarded a CBE for services to chemical engineering.

“We had a very high response to this campaign and were hugely impressed with the entries. This list of amazing role models is a great way of raising the profile of our talented women engineers and making them more visible both within the industry and to the next generation,” said WES chief executive Dawn Bonfield.

Other winners include Steph McGovern, the BBC journalist who hosted the IChemE Awards in 2015, Dame Ann Dowling, president of the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng), Naomi Climer, president of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), Chi Onwurah, the only female engineer in the House of Commons, and Baroness Brown of Cambridge DBE, vice-chancellor and chief executive at Aston University, Birmingham.