Roma Agrawal | |
|---|---|
 Roma Agrawal at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | |
| Born | Mumbai, India |
| Alma mater | University of Oxford Imperial College London |
| Occupation | Structural Engineer |
| Employer | AECOM |
| Known for |
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Roma Agrawal MBE FICE HonFREng is an Indian-British chartered structural engineer based in London. She has worked on several major engineering projects, including the Shard. Agrawal is also an author and a diversity campaigner, championing women in engineering.
Agrawal was born in 1983 in Mumbai, India, before moving to London. [1] She also lived in Ithaca, New York for five years. [2] She completed her A-Levels at North London Collegiate School. In 2004, she gained a BA in physics from the University of Oxford, and in 2005, an MSc in Structural Engineering from Imperial College London.
Agrawal attributes her enthusiasm for engineering to her love of making (and breaking) things, cultivated by playing with Lego as a child. [3] Agrawal attributes her entry into engineering to a summer placement at the Oxford Physics Department where she worked alongside engineers who were designing particle detectors for CERN. [4]
In 2005, Agrawal joined Parsons Brinckerhoff (later called WSP) on a graduate program, becoming a chartered engineer with the Institution of Structural Engineers in 2011. She spent six years working on the tallest building in Western Europe, the Shard, designing the foundations and the iconic spire. [5] [ dubious ] She describes the project as a career highlight: "I think projects like that only come once or twice in your career, so I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on this". [6] The 1,016-foot (310 m) tall structure required a top-down construction methodology, which had never been done before on a building of this scale. [7] The spire required modular construction that could be built and tested off-site, enabling quick and safe assembly at height in central London. [8]
Alongside the Shard, Agrawal worked on Crystal Palace Station and the Northumbria University Footbridge.[ citation needed ] She worked for WSP for ten years before joining Interserve as a Design Manager in November 2015. [9] In May 2017, Agrawal joined AECOM as an associate director. [10]
In 2018 Agrawal was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). [11] She was appointed a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 2018 [ citation needed ] and elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2021 [12]
Following her six years working on The Shard, Agrawal found herself presenting on her work to children at school and students at university and found a passion for raising awareness of engineering. [18] She has since presented to over 15,000 people worldwide.[ citation needed ]
Agrawal's career has been covered extensively in both online and print media. [19] She was a founding member of the Your Life Campaign, designed to change school children's perception of science and engineering backed by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. [20]
In 2014, she was part of Marks and Spencer's Leading Ladies campaign, alongside Annie Lennox, Emma Thompson and Rita Ora. [21] Later that year, she was chosen as one of six women engineers to follow on Twitter by The Guardian . [22] She has given two TEDx talks, "City 2.0" (2013) [23] and "Three Moments that will Change the World" (2015). [24] She has featured on several BBC, Channel 4, and Science Channel television programs. Since 2017, she has appeared as a judge on the Channel 4 reality programme Lego Masters [25] and as a structural engineer expert on Mysteries of the Abandoned. [26] She judged the trophy design competition for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2015 and 2017.[ citation needed ]
Agrawal's book, titled Built: the Hidden Stories Behind our Structures, an introduction to structural engineering, was published in 2018. [27] The IET E&T magazine described it as a "a treatise on structural engineering". They went on to say
Roma Agrawal has a knack for taking complex concepts, stripping them down and reducing them to their most basic form ... What makes 'Built' so enjoyable is the way Agrawal applies her enquiring mind ... to an engineering world that she finds simultaneously invisible while being no less than fundamental to modern society. [28]
In 2013, Agrawal was voted one of Management Today 's Top 35 Women Under 35. [29] She raises awareness through social media, podcasts and interviews. [30] [31] [32] [33] After being a finalist herself in 2012, [34] she was a keynote speaker at the IET's Young Women Engineer of the Year award ceremony in 2016, and in 2017 was listed as one of the "Inspiring Women in Engineering" by the Women's Engineering Society. [35]
| Year | Title | Publisher | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures | Bloomsbury Publishing | ISBN 978-1-4088-7037-2 |
| 2021 | How Was That Built? | Bloomsbury Publishing | |
| 2023 | Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (In a Big Way) | Hodder | TBC |
The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) is a multidisciplinary professional engineering institution. The IET was formed in 2006 from two separate institutions: the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), dating back to 1871, and the Institution of Incorporated Engineers (IIE) dating back to 1884. Its worldwide membership is currently in excess of 158,000 in 153 countries. The IET's main offices are in Savoy Place in London, England, and at Michael Faraday House in Stevenage, England.
Karen Margaret Holford is a Welsh engineer, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of Cranfield University. She was formerly Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Cardiff University. She is also a former Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Physical Sciences and Engineering and Head of the School of Engineering. She is an active researcher of acoustic emission and her work has been applied to damage assessment inspections on industrial components.
Naomi Wendy Climer, is a British engineer who has worked in broadcast, media and communications technology chiefly at the BBC and Sony Professional Solutions, and was the first female President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). Climer is the co-founder and co-chair of the Institute for the Future of Work.
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Abigail Hutty is a British mechanical engineer based in Stevenage. She has worked as the lead structures engineer on the European Space Agency ExoMars rover, now the Rosalind Franklin rover vehicle. In 2016, she was elected as the youngest ever Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. She advocates the science and technology education of young people and promotion of careers in the space industry. Her public appearances have included the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and The Sky at Night.
Rachel Susan Skinner is a British civil engineer with Canadian-based consultant WSP Global. She was named one of the Daily Telegraph Top 50 Influential Women in Engineering in 2016 and both the Best Woman Civil Engineer and the Most Distinguished Winner at the European Women in Construction and Engineering Awards in 2017. Skinner became the youngest president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 2020. In 2019, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng). She was appointed CBE for services to infrastructure in the 2022 New Year Honours.
Jessica Leigh Jones is a Welsh engineer and astrophysicist from Cardiff. She is credited with becoming the first female to win the UK Young Engineer of the Year Award in 2012 for her work designing a portable uterine contraction monitor which cut manufacturing costs by 99%. She was later rewarded for her efforts to commercialise the technology, receiving the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Intel Inspiration Award for Entrepreneurship in the same year.
Claudia de Rham is a Swiss theoretical physicist working at the interface of gravity, cosmology and particle physics. She is based at Imperial College London. She was one of the UK finalists in the Physical Sciences and Engineering category of the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2018 for revitalizing the theory of massive gravity, and won the award in 2020.
Dr Nike Folayan is a Chartered Engineer and a Telecommunications Engineering Consultant. She is co-founder and chair of the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers that campaigns for more ethnic diversity in UK engineering.
Yewande Akinola is a Chartered Engineer who specialises in sustainable water supplies. She works as Principal Engineer for Laing O'Rourke and hosts television shows about engineering for Channel 4 and National Geographic.
Ozak-Obazi Oluwaseyi Esu is a Nigerian electrical engineer who is the technical lead at the BRE Centre for Smart Homes and Buildings (CSHB). She previously worked at Cundall in Birmingham, designing the electrical services for buildings.
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Lego Masters is a British reality show in which teams compete to build the best Lego project. During its original run, it was hosted by Melvin Odoom and judged by Lego designer Matthew Ashton and structural engineer Roma Agrawal and Fran Scott. Lego Masters premiered on Channel 4 on 24 August 2017. After a hiatus of four years, the show came back for a Christmas special on 24 December 2022 hosted by Nish Kumar and judged by Ashton and Amy Corbett from the US version of Lego Masters. The programme is produced by Tuesday's Child. The 2022 Christmas special was filmed in Warsaw, on the set of Poland's Lego Masters, and co-produced by Endemol Shine Polska.
Mamta Singhal MBE BEng MSc MBA CEng FIET FWES is a design engineer and an active campaigner on diversity in engineering. In 2022 she was awarded an MBE in the New Years Honours for services to engineering. In 2007, she was awarded the Women's Engineering Society Prize for engaging and inspiring young people's interest in STEM.
Sophie Harker is a British engineer and an aerodynamicist. She specializes in aerodynamics and performance engineering within BAE Systems’ Concepts and Technology team, who works closely on the aircraft of the future. Harker is one of the youngest engineers to have achieved Chartered Engineer status, doing so at age 25. In 2018, she was the winner of the IET's Young Women Engineer of the Year Award.
Alexis Lewis is an American inventor, repeat science fair winner and public speaker. She is best known for her advocacy for invention education and her humanitarian inventions. She is known to have given talks at the White House, Smithsonian, SXSW, National Maker Faire, the 2018 Social Innovation Summit, and at TEDx events. Lewis also gained repeat standing as a finalist or winner in national and international science and invention fairs, including the 2012 Broadcom MASTERS Challenge. In the course of the Spark!Lab Invent It Challenge, Lewis won pro-bono patent counsel, and holds a patent on the "Rescue Travois", granted 2015 and has one pending, on the "Emergency Mask Pod".
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