Keynote Speakers
Dr. Keerthi Devendra
Director, KD Engineering Consultancy
Keerthi received his Ph.D. (and Bertold Eichler Memorial Prize) from the University of Sheffield, M.Sc. from the University of Edinburgh, and B.Sc. from the University of Ceylon.
Having started his career as a physicist, Keerthi ended up as a highly successful engineering programme manager, chartered engineer as well as a materials scientist. In recent years he has been actively mentoring and coaching young Engineers.
Keerthi had an extensive career (~ 34 years) at Rolls Royce plc, which covered programme management, materials development and testing, manufacturing technology development, gas turbine engine design–development–testing (bench testing as well as flight testing), and service management. He has held many different positions such as Chief of Sub Systems, Work Package Owner, Staff Manufacturing Engineer, Principal Scientist, Principal Engineer, Team Leader, and Risk Manager. He served at a number of different geographical locations of Rolls Royce plc, including Bristol, Derby, and Germany. As part of different engineering projects, he managed activities in the USA, Canada, Spain, Ireland, France, Germany, and the UK. Keerthi has consistently demonstrated his ability to motivate multi-disciplinary cross-cultural teams to deliver outstanding results under most challenging circumstances.
More recently, Keerthi has served as the Head of Value Stream at Assystem UK, and as Director of KD Engineering Consultancy. Prior to joining Rolls-Royce plc, his early career was in the HE sector as a lecturer and a researcher.
In his talk, Keerthi will be discussing Practical Engineering Excellence - why and how? As described below.
Practical Engineering Excellence - why and how?
Society has always depended on the ability of engineers to produce the most effective solutions to problems of the day. In solving ‘problems’, engineers must understand how to apply scientific principles to create useful practical products and processes that help human activities. As such, within the curriculum, engineering students need to develop practical skills in parallel with analytical skills that would give them the confidence to approach a problem rationally and deliver innovative solutions once they step into the world of work.
Most young engineers acquire valuable hands-on practical experience during a period of internship, whilst being employed in a specific industry sector. Within the programme of academic study, some students have the opportunity to gain invaluable work experience during a sandwich placement. However, the challenges faced by the industry in the modern world mean that, although these methods are useful, there is an ever-increasing demand for versatile, ‘industry-ready graduates’. The engineering curriculum delivery methods need to meet this challenge.
Universities have well-developed, time-tested approaches that provide scientific and practical engineering education to students to enable them to solve problems in their respective fields of study. To close the gap between skills acquired within the academic environment and the competence needed to work successfully in a wide range of industries, the students need to develop a range of transferable skills that will apply in any engineering context. However, to achieve the broader objectives of this conference, the speaker believes that it is equally important to focus on approaches to develop subject-specific practical skills. This can only be done by specialists in a subject area at the module team level with innovative thinking and perhaps radical changes in approach. For example, in a student population of diverse knowledge, skill, and ability levels, modelling and simulation may fascinate many IT-savvy students, while some others may be more interested in a direct hands-on approach to learning imparted through industry standard machinery and equipment in a well-designed laboratory set-up.
In an increasingly global scenario, practical engineering education is about developing high calibre, industry-ready engineers the world needs. This keynote speech is intended to generate some ideas about what we need to think about and how we need to approach the challenge within a highly time-constrained academic environment. The speaker will use his extensive experience in the aerospace industry to promote some ideas and facilitate further discussion.
Professor Simon Guest
Head of Civil Engineering, University of Cambridge
Simon is Professor of Structural Mechanics, in the Structures Group of the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. His teaching is in structural mechanics, and his research straddles the border between traditional structural mechanics, and the study of mechanisms. He is also a fellow of Trinity Hall.
In his keynote presentation, Simon will discuss how we can embed practical education into engineering courses? We will consider what can be learned from the Structural Design Course, a cornerstone of the Cambridge undergraduate engineering curriculum. The course is a design-build-test exercise: first-year students build a metal truss structure with a maximum dimension of about 1m to carry a load of about 3kN. The course has been essentially unchanged for 60 years: it remains the most popular, and the most memorable, part of the student experience. It is resource intensive, but its continuation is never questioned – and indeed, during the pandemic, our first priority was to work out how to let this course run.
This talk will explore why the course has been so effective. What can we learn from its success? What can we do to make other practical engineering education exercises equally successful, and equally embedded in engineering education?
