The Speakers
Keynote speakers
Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE - CEO Royal Academy of Engineering
Hayaatun is CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation. She co-chairs with the Science Minister the government’s Business Innovation Forum and co-chaired with Sir Lewis Hamilton his Commission on improving Black representation in motorsport. She is a trustee of various charities, member of the government’s Levelling Up Advisory Council and Digital Skills Council and NXD at construction company Laing O’Rourke. She has been named as one of the ‘Inspiring 50’ women in tech in Europe and one of the most influential women in both UK engineering and UK tech.
She has a Masters in Biochemistry (MBiochem) from Oxford and a PhD from Cancer Research UK/UCL. She is a Fellow of the IET, Honorary Professor at UCL and Honorary Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford. She has received honorary doctorates from UCL, Imperial College London, Newcastle, Brunel, Huddersfield and Southampton, as well as a Science Suffrage Award and the Engineering Professor’s Council President’s Medal. She was a finalist for the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award and was made a CBE for services to International Engineering in 2019.
Prior to her current roles, she was Deputy CEO at the Academy and served as Committee Specialist and later Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee.
Kerry Scott - Global Lead for Environment & Society, Mott McDonald
Kerry leads a global network of specialist social inclusion and development consultants. They work with clients to help ensure their projects, infrastructure and services deliver more socially inclusive outcomes. They support development, service & policy design. They provide research, consultancy, assessment and advice for local, national and international clients in both the public and private sector. They have extensive experience in delivering stakeholder consultation and engagement activities & are passionate about including communities, particularly those who are most vulnerable. Their work spans a range of sectors including health, transport, environment, energy, international development, buildings and equality & diversity.
Kerry has a passion for social inclusion and development. With nearly 20 years’ experience she has developed considerable technical and managerial expertise, built teams & driven growth. She has held positions in consultancy, the public sector and politics and worked across a variety of sectors, including health, transport and the environment. Her professional priorities include making a positive difference in the communities they work in; exceeding their clients’ expectations; and building motivated teams to ensure growth, retention and staff fulfilment.
Emma Crichton - Innovation Director, Engineers Without Borders
Emma is a designer, chartered engineer and passionate advocate for globally responsible engineering.
Engineering shapes the world in which we all live. She puts her efforts into reshaping engineering to create a safe and just future for all.
After six years in Scottish water industry, in 2019 Emma joined Engineers Without Borders UK which aimed to upskill over 250,000 people by 2030 to be equipped with the skills necessary to create the best world possible. They work with their partners around the world, and help shape modules within degree courses at a pivotal part of university degrees. Since 2011 they have reached over 70,000 undergraduates. They train educators, leaders, organisations, and teams to build their skills and capacity. They are working closely with torganisations such as Energy Saving Trust, Engineers Without Borders South Africa, Jacobs, Royal Academy of Engineering, TEDI-London and City, University of London.
Prof Beverley Gibbs - Director, Dyson Institute of Engineering & Technology
Beverley joined the Dyson Institute in 2023 as Director, and Professor of Engineering Education Leadership. Her professional background is in production engineering and engineering management, and my academic experience has focussed on leadership of innovative engineering education environments. She has led large-scale curriculum change in a research-intensive university and have taken an independent Higher Education Institute through academic mobilisation to the award of new degree awarding powers.
Beverley is passionate about the future of engineering education, the power of higher education to transform lives, and the central role of engineering and technology in society and the economy.
Keynote 5 - TBD
Details coming soon when confirmed
UCL Transdisciplinary Engineering Panel
Mark Miodownik - Professor of Materials & Society
Mark Andrew Miodownik MBE FREng is a British materials scientist, engineer, broadcaster, and writer at University College London (UCL). Previously, he was the head of the Materials Research Group at King's College London, and a co-founder of Materials Library.
Miodownik's scientific research is primarily in Materials Science, Metallurgy and Biomechanics. He has also been key to the development of the concept of sensoaesthetics, which is the "application of scientific methodology to the aesthetic, sensual and emotional side" of materials.
Miodownik is widely known for his broadcasting and outreach work. In 2001 he gave a series of talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) on aesthetics in the arts and sciences. In 2003 he co-founded the Materials Library, a website for people working in materials science, with a grant from NESTA. In 2005 he organised two talks at Tate Modern on the influence of new materials on the arts. In 2006 he and two other scientists produced AfterImage, an installation that explores light and colour perception, which was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery. In 2007 the Materials Library made a podcast, "What can the matter be?", hosted by the Tate. He was interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili for The Life Scientific first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2014.
Miodownik was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2014.His book Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World won the 2014 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, and a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Communication Award in 2015. He was awarded the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Public Engagement with Science the same year.
In 2017, Miodownik was awarded the Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture by the Royal Society, and in the 2018 New Year Honours he was awarded an MBE for "services to Science, Engineering and Broadcasting".
Sir Geoff Mulgan CBE - Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy & Social Innovation
Sir Geoff Mulgan CBE is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London (UCL). Prior to that he was Chief Executive of Nesta, the UK's innovation foundation, between 2011 and the end of 2019. From 1997 to 2004 Geoff had roles in the UK government including director of the Government's Strategy Unit and head of policy in the Prime Minister's office. From 2004 to 2011 he was the first Chief Executive of The Young Foundation. He was the first director of the think-tank Demos; and has been a reporter on BBC TV and radio.
At UCL he teaches undergraduates (in the Science and Engineering for Social Change BSc), graduate students in MPA programmes, and PhD students. He has a PhD in telecommunications and has been a visiting professor at London School of Economics (LSE) and Melbourne University, a senior visiting scholar at Harvard University and President of the Innovation Design Department at the Italian University for Design (IAAD) in Turin. He has also been a regular lecturer at the China Executive Leadership Academy.
Geoff helped found many organisations including Demos, the Young Foundation, the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX), Uprising, Studio Schools Trust, Action for Happiness, the Alliance for Useful Evidence, the Australia Centre for Social Innovation and Nesta Italia. He has co-chaired a World Economic Forum group looking at innovation and entrepreneurship in the fourth industrial revolution.
He has advised many governments. He is on the advisory panel for STOA which advises the European Parliament on science and technology. He was a World Economic Forum Schwab Fellow from 2019-22, and a fellow of Demos Helsinki and the New Institute in Hamburg. In 2023-24 he chairs a European Commission programme on 'Whole of Government Innovation'. He is an editor in chief of the Collective Intelligence journal published by ACM and Sage (launched 2022). He has pioneered many ideas used by governments and others – including creative economy strategies, joined-up government, anticipatory regulation, experimentalism, open innovation and problem-solving methods. Geoff has given TED talks on the future economy, happiness and education.
His Twitter handle is @geoffmulgan and a summary of ideas Geoff has worked on can be found here. His website is geoffmulgan.com He was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2020.
Dr Yasmine Sabri - Lecturer (Teaching) in Humanitarian & Disaster Logistics
I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) teaching in Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management in the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London (UCL IRDR), and a visiting fellow of the Risk & Resilience Management of Complex Socio-Technical Systems research group in Politecnico di Milano in Italy.
ِAs the IRDR director of education and student experience, I oversee teaching strategic planning and curriculum development across several postgraduate and undergraduate programmes in Risk, Resilience and Humanitarian Action at UCL. I am also a member of the department’s management committee, the chair of departmental teaching and syllabus committees, and a member of the MAPS faculty education committee.
My research is interdisciplinary and centred on supply chain design in high uncertainty environments. It considers demand, supply, and/or innovation uncertainties that arise as a result of exogenous disruptions such as disasters, or risks inherent to the supply chain eco-system, such as poor integration between and within organisations.
I received several best research paper awards and was awarded my PhD degree with distinction. I carry out supply chain research in a number of contexts, e.g., industrial projects, medical and healthcare, SMEs, and humanitarian sectors, happy to accept PhD candidates interested in these topics.
I joined UCL from Aston University in Birmingham, where I was a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Supply chain management, the director of undergraduate logistics and supply chain management programmes, and the Teaching Excellence Framework lead for the logistics and supply chain management subject area.
Anna Mavrogianni - Professor of Sustainable, Healthy & Equitable Built Environment
Prof Anna Mavrogianni is Professor of Sustainable, Healthy and Equitable Built Environment at the Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering (IEDE) at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources (BSEER), at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, UCL. Within IEDE, she leads the Research Theme on Temperature, Moisture and Air Quality. With a background in architectural engineering and building physics, Anna is an expert in building indoor environmental quality and energy performance analysis, and climate change adaptation of the built environment sector, with a focus on overheating and air pollution at the building and urban scale, and associated impacts on human wellbeing, health and health inequalities.
In the last 15 years, Anna led, co-led or significantly contributed to more than 30 research projects, and co-authored over 150 peer reviewed publications, book chapters, Government and industry reports. She recently led the EPSRC-funded project ‘Advancing School Performance: Indoor environmental quality, Resilience and Educational outcomes’ (ASPIRE) and led work on the quantification of climate change impacts on UK housing heating and cooling needs, as part of the DESNZ ‘Climate Services for a Net-Zero World’ (CS-N0W) project. She is part of the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Environmental Change and Health and the Clean Air Network 'Health and Equity Impacts of Climate Change Mitigation measures on indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure' (HEICCAM), where she leads the Early Career Researcher (ECR) group. She is also a Co-Investigator in the NERC-funded ClimaCare project, assessing the climate resilience of UK care homes, and an NIHR-funded project, aiming to quantify the potential health and health equality impacts of planning deregulation housing in England.
Anna is a member of the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) Knowledge Management Committee and a Co-Secretary of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA)-England Board. She is an Associate Editor at the Energy and Buildings journal, and a member of the Editorial Boards of the journals Buildings and Cities, Sustainable Cities and Society, and Advances in Building Energy Research, where she has acted as a Guest Editor or Co-Guest Editor of Special Issues on sustainability, climate justice, health and health inequalities related to buildings and urban environments.