British engineers inspire new generation by focusing on nation’s health and wellbeing

10 December, 2019

Engineers are key to helping the nation keep healthy and well from helping find cures for cancer and keeping people safe at sea to helping dementia patients.

Impact

Five engineers from across the UK were handpicked to front #EngineerOnAMission for Tomorrow’s Engineers Week 2019 to inspire a new generation into the profession. EngineeringUK estimates that the UK needs tens of thousands more engineers annually.

Each Engineer on a Mission is the star of a film that highlights the impact engineers have on people’s lives, which was shown to around 50,000 students at the Tomorrow’s Engineers Week Big Assembly on 6  November.

Engineers featured during Tomorrow’s Engineers Week included:

Ellen Harper, 22, a masters student at University of Strathclyde who helps those with restricted mobility to swim. She designs and manufactures Poolpods, which provide dignified, independent access to swimming pools and were used during the Paralympic Games in London, 2012.

Hiba Khan, 29, a civil engineer keeping people’s homes safe. Hiba works on international flood defences and her biggest project is in Bangladesh, where rivers up to 8km wide can erode hundreds of metres of bank per year.

Rhodri Lewis, 39, a lifeboat systems engineer at RNLI. Rhodri builds, develops and maintains the rescue equipment to ensure they are in good working order when the volunteers go to sea, often in dangerous situations.

Rebecca Shipley, 36, a healthcare engineer helping to beat cancer for University College London, develops tools to visualise the structure of cancerous tissues in the body and better predict where drugs will be delivered to within the tumours.

Severin Skillman, 26, is a software engineer with the UK Dementia Research Institute. He develops software that helps people affected by dementia to live in their own homes by monitoring their health and behaviour.

Varied, stimulating and rewarding career

Dr Hilary Leevers, CEO at EngineeringUK, the organisers of Tomorrow’s Engineers Week, commented: “We want every young person to see that engineering offers a varied, stimulating and rewarding career. The UK needs tens of thousands more engineers and Tomorrow’s Engineers Week provides an opportunity for the engineering community to work together to inspire the next generation of engineers to meet this demand.”

Tomorrow’s Engineers Week provides a unique opportunity for universities, schools, employers, professional institutions and engineers to drive interest in engineering careers, showing young people the ways in which engineers are on a mission to make the world a better place, find innovative solutions and shape the way we live.

Employers, professional bodies, universities, schools and individual engineers are invited to get involved to help inspire the next generation of engineers by downloading toolkits of ideas at www.tomorrowsengineers.org.uk/teweek.

Further highlights of the Week included the first This is Engineering Day, challenging the public stereotype of the engineer and the second Tomorrow’s Engineers Week Big Assembly, which saw over 50,000 pupils taking part in the same assembly, at the same time.