IROE Chair, Susan Gourvenec, presents at Engineering @ Southampton celebration event
Staff, students, alumni and visitors had an afternoon of celebrating Engineering at Southampton at Turner Sims on Highfield Campus. The event celebrated those recently elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering “… in recognition of their outstanding and continuing contributions to the profession”.
Dr Andrew Clark, Director of Programmes, Royal Academy of Engineering, opened the event by sharing the history of the Academy and how it has become a prestigious and globally recognised institute, along with highlighting various initiatives and successes of the Academy.
Professor Susan Gourvenec, FREng, IROE Chair and Professor of Offshore Geotechnical Engineering, set the context and need for intelligent and resilient ocean engineering to meet offshore wind and broader decarbonization targets to address climate change, and highlighted some of the ongoing research works and outputs of the Centre of Excellence for Intelligent & Resilient Ocean Engineering, supported by her Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies. Susan also highlighted multi-disciplinary projects that she is involved in including Engineering X Safer End of Engineered Life, and a recent project for the UK Government on the Future Blue Economy that Susan led as part of her role as Deputy Director of the multi-disciplinary Southampton Marine & Maritime Institute.
The other presenters, Dr Paul Gosling FREng, Chief Technology Officer, Thales UK, Professor Honor Powrie FREng, GE Aviation & Visiting Professor, Southampton, and Graham Henley FREng, Senior Vice-President, Engineering & Projects Capability, Shell, presented on their wide-ranging career activities that led to their election as FREng.
The afternoon concluded with a panel discussion on the engineering skills gap – identifying a shortage of the necessary skills for young people to enter engineering as a profession, a shortage of skills for the future engineering profession, and a lack of diversity, affecting the pipeline of potential engineers as well as the efficacy of engineered solutions for the grand challenges of today and the future.