Prestigious judging panel announced for the Young Structural Engineering International Design Competition 2020

Tom Newby, Chair of the Humanitarian and International Development Panel, Associate Director at Buro Happold
 
Tom Newby, an emergency shelter expert, once led CARE's global international shelter team. The team’s remit supported disaster risk reduction and post disaster programmes around the world. This included the 2017 World Habitat Awards winning project.
 
Tom is particularly interested in supporting vulnerable and marginalised people to make their own choices and decisions and avoiding patriarchal approaches. He hopes to see good insights from the submissions as to how to achieve this.

 

Jo de Serrano, CEO of RedR

Jo de Serrano is an expert in deployment surge mechanism for humanitarian response. She was part of DFID’s CHASE Operations Team for 12 years and involved in every emergency from the Indonesian Tsunami in 2004 through to 2017, including emergencies such as the Pakistan earthquake, Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, the Syria crisis and Ebola response.

In recognition for her work in deploying personnel in global humanitarian emergency response, Jo was awarded an OBE in 2016 and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Portsmouth in 2017.

Jo elaborated on her reasons for deciding to help judge the competition’s submissions: "As I am not an engineer, I am particularly interested to find out if gender, disability and age considerations are taken into account in any of the designs, all issues which are extremely important considerations in development and humanitarian contexts".
 

Shalini Jagnarine-Azan, current IStructE Board member, International PAHO Consultant, Lead Design Engineer at Boomer Construction

Shalini works in humanitarian and disaster response. The past 7 years I have worked on projects in developing countries aimed at mitigating the impact of natural hazards and climate change on healthcare facilities.

Shalini is interested to hear from the next generation of engineers on “how they will approach and deal with the current climate crisis”.
 

Claire Lewis, previous member of the Education Trust

Over the last 10 years Claire has worked with IStructE as an educationalist. Including the former Educational Trust and the Education Committee.

"I am excited to see the entries for this year’s particularly topical competition."
 

John Muddiman, Education Committee - Brief author

John has worked in multi-disciplinary consultancy for 20 years. He has led the structural design of projects for a diverse client base around the UK. The projects have ranged from modest schemes to those with multi-million pound budgets’

His experience includes being on various Institution Committees. John has also served on the IStructE Council.

As a long standing environmental campaigner, interested in conservation and sustainability, John explains his reasoning behind creating the competition’s brief; “I conceived of the idea because I was aware that this is a very real design need, which will affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, which up till now had not been addressed and in wide-reaching manner. The great hope is that Engineers around the world will now be enthused to become involved with the work.”

 

About the Young Structural Engineer International Design competition

The competition is run every three years and awards three cash prizes. To enter, young engineers submitted conceptual sketch design proposals. Click here for more information.