Celebrating women in engineering

The theme for this year’s International Women in Engineering Day is Make Safety Seen. The women in engineering featured below are shining examples of how supporting a diverse, global engineering industry is vital to building a safer and more sustainable world.

• Vina Nanda Garjati, Lecturer, Jakarta State Polytechnic
  • Lloyd’s Register Foundation beneficiary Vina is helping disrupt gender imbalances in the engineering sector, empowered by our South East Asia Skills Enhancement Programme (SEASEP) along with a cohort of fully funded female engineers to help tackle skill shortages and reduce occupational fatalities.
  • Vina was accepted by the government to be a lecturer at Jakarta State Polytechnic. Vina has translated her learning from the SEASEP into the classroom, where the new engineers and practical workers produced by the University have a new understanding and appreciation for safety in the workplace.
  • “I want to say to all women – do not hesitate to pursue your career in the engineering field. It’s in our hands to inspire the next generation of innovators and problem solvers.”

• Rebecca Boston, Lloyd’s Register Foundation and Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow in Materials Science and Engineering, University of Sheffield
  • For five years, Lloyd’s Register Foundation sponsored Rebecca through a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship. Her research focused on improving the sustainability and function of oxide materials for use in electronic devices such as batteries, capacitors, and thermoelectrics.
  • Her growing team of 14 at the University of Sheffield have benefited from over £23 million of grants and have expanded their research to novel routes for device fabrication; working to ensure the future sustainability of these key materials and their manufacture.
  • “Lloyd’s Register Foundation has really helped me to see my research in a new way, but also has provided me with the platform to expand my impact and enabled me to support the next generation of researchers.”

• Andriannah Mbandi, Waste Lead, UN High Level Climate Champions
  • Andriannah leads a team of scientists that began working in partnership with Engineering X to find a solution to the open burning of waste, with an initial focus on Africa.
  • Founded by the Royal Academy of Engineering and Lloyd’s Register Foundation, Engineering X is an international collaboration that brings together some of the world’s leading problem-solvers to address the great challenges of our age.
  • “From the first moments, our team knew that partnership was the only way to end an unsafe practice that has been going on for centuries. By bringing together NGOs and civil society, alongside public and private sector entities – including those informal groups that currently handle waste – we’ve already made excellent progress.”

• Katherine Weatherburn, Founder, Safetyknot 
  • Katherine established Safetyknot in 2018, and in 2021 was a successful applicant to the Foundation’s small grants scheme. With support from the Foundation, the organisation has developed a range of training packs that include everything required to upskill construction workers across Asia in safe practices.  All training and resources are grounded in storytelling and events from real life, using contextually appropriate content that local people can understand and engage with – even those who cannot read or write.
  • “I was working for many years in low and middle income countries across Asia, and many preventable injuries were happening everyday in plain sight. Thanks to financial support from Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s small grants programme, we’ve been able to distribute training packs to 29 organisations in Cambodia and Nepal, reaching an estimated 7,000 people.”

• Helen Balmforth, Programme Director, Discovering Safety 
  • In 2017, Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) established Discovering Safety – a programme using state of the art technology to analyse historic safety data to predict and prevent workplace accidents.
  • Helen Balmforth, Head of Data Analytics at HSE and Programme Director of Discovering Safety, has been driving the programme to new heights – delivering six innovative and ground-breaking workstreams with 250 key industry and academic stakeholders across 21 countries.
  • “This is a massive programme that’s going to make a difference to health and safety on a truly global scale. That might sound like a hugely ambitious goal, but it’s absolutely achievable if we use innovative techniques to open up the wealth of data available to us.”

International Women in Engineering Day is brought to you by the Women’s Engineering Society. Help celebrate #INWED23 by signing up to their newsletter and following on on Twitter and Instagram.