Finalists for Progress Network – Consultant of the Future Award

Roma Agrawal, WSP

Roma has designed a range of complex towers, bridges and sculptures, including The Shard. In addition to winning several industry and leadership awards, her career has been widely featured in the media.

She was featured in a documentary and has been interviewed by the BBC and newspapers as a role model to inspire future engineers.

She is passionate about promoting the industry; in 2013 alone she spoke at over 30 venues to over 2000 people and continues to look for new ways to engage policy-makers and the public to improve our industry and influence change. Her website www.RomaTheEngineer.com highlights her achievments.

Alice Berry, Arup

During the past year Alice Berry has taken a leading role in geotechnical projects around the world.

Selected to work in Arup’s Hong Kong office, she created earthquake resistant designs for energy facilities in Indonesia and the Philippines, allowing the client to optimise expenditure by using local labour.

In her spare time she successfully learnt Cantonese. Now back in London she leads the ground investigation for a large mixed-use development and manages staff worldwide for a public sectorseismic assessment programme.

Alice gives back to the engineering community, coordinating her department’s training needs and leading initiatives to promote office sustainability.

Christian Christodoulou, AECOM

Christian is a professional engineer with responsibilities as international technical specialist and project leader, identifying problems and developing innovative solutions for major projects in USA and New Zealand.

As the project manager for the refurbishment of the underground car park at Westminster Palace he brought both technical and management leadership in developing a business case to the Treasury.

In addition, he has been appointed as team leader of the AECOM Bridges & Structures team in the Midlands responsible for operational, commercial and business development control. At the same time, he complete his Engineering Doctorate.

Chris Mundell, Atkins

Over the last year, Chris has been involved in a large range of schemes and has seen his responsibilities increase substantially.

In the short period since becoming Chartered,he has project managed several successful schemes, carried out in-depth technically challenging design work, taken the lead of a task group within the BEWG, lectured and produced technical papers.

He feels his engineering career is going from strength to strength, and, he says, looks forward to greater responsibilities to both challenge him and  allow him to place his own mark within the engineering community.

Natasha Watson, Buro Happold Ltd

Natasha believes engineers have a responsibility to do more than just their day job. She work for a company known for its technical excellence, but her technical ability is, she says, just one facet of her career.

"I want the reduction of the embodied impacts of our built environment to become standard practice, and I am working towards that throughmy research. I want the public to appreciate engineers, and I am working towards that with my public engagement activities," she says.

Future generations must see engineering as a varied and rewarding career, and she is leading by example.

Thomas Webster, AECOM

It has been an extraordinary year for Thomas with the successful delivery of the complex 2013 Serpentine Pavilion and  work on the 2016 Rio Olympic venues just some of the highlights.

He was described as a “hidden hero” by World Architecture News for his role in making Fujimoto’s extraordinary steel-cloud Serpentine Pavilion a reality.

"All of this is just the beginning of a personal project that was started late in 2010," he says. "His team and I have come a long way in this short time. Imagine where we will be in another two or three years!"