Top 20 Women in Ground Engineering: Industry influencers

Yvonne Ainsworth

Managing director (onshore), Gavin & Doherty Geosolutions

Yvonne Ainsworth is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), a chartered engineer, Register of Ground Engineering Professionals adviser and an experienced ICE reviewer. She is a geotechnics, deep foundations and basement construction specialist, with more than 20 years’ experience.

During the early part of her career, she worked for high profile companies such as Balfour Beatty, Sol Expert, Bauer Technologies, Cementation Skanska and Atkins. Often these roles were site based, leading complex piling programmes. In recent years, she has worked for the consultant Gavin & Doherty Geosolutions and has also found time to act as honorary treasurer for the British Geotechnical Association.

Working in both consulting and contracting, she has been heavily involved in concept, tender and detailed designs, as well as the estimating and construction/execution of projects. She has a proven track record in the delivery of major foundation projects and the execution of complex projects, including a D-shaped pile at Tottenham Court Road Station and possession works on the S105, M8 Improvement works.

She specialises in supporting the construction industry in all areas of construction processes, including project feasibility assessment and technical development, tender preparation, construction advice, incident investigations and project management, with the aim of improving overall efficiency and performance.

Ainsworth’s strengths lie in solving technical challenges and developing effective and practical solutions. She is also passionate about diversity and inclusion and dedicated to the improvement of the geotechnical industry.

Liz Brown

Partner, Campbell Reith

Chartered geologist Liz Brown has an MSc in soil mechanics from Heriot-Watt University and has worked in the ground engineering industry for more than 35 years. She joined Campbell Reith as a senior geotechnical engineer and worked her way up to become the first female partner in 2008. She has steadily grown the geotechnical division from a single person to a team of ten geologists and engineers split between the London and Bristol offices. She has led the team to win Consulting Firm of the Year at the GE Awards in 2017 and 2023.

Brown has accumulated a diverse and interesting portfolio of projects over her career, including a 28.5m deep basement in central London, which won Geotechnical Project of the Year at the 2018 GE Awards. She is experienced in geotechnical design and modelling, providing evidence based site appraisals and economic and sustainable recommendations for earthworks, foundations, basements, slope stability and retaining walls.

More recently, Brown has been co-leading a new initiative to nurture collaboration and engagement between the Association of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Specialists and the Institution of Structural Engineers. She recognises this as being an even more important relationship with the release of the new Eurocodes, as they demand closer collaboration between structural and geotechnical engineers.

Brown won and manages Campbell Reith’s appointment to the London Borough of Camden to be its sole independent auditor of basement impact assessments, and regularly attends council meetings where she deftly presents technical information to councillors.

She also champions the discipline for younger engineers entering the industry, providing support, encouragement and mentorship, and empowering women to thrive in the world of ground engineering.

Lindsay Burt

Associate, Arup

Lindsay Burt leads Arup’s ground engineering team in the Midlands. She has over 24 years’ experience of multi-disciplinary infrastructure and site development projects. She has led geotechnical design teams on several phases of HS2 and provides specialist advice on earthwork material classification, volume assessment and soil stabilisation. Burt’s technical knowledge is supported by a PhD from the University of Birmingham, focused on soil stabilisation and carbonation, combined with over five years of construction site supervision experience of major earthworks, land reclamation, drainage and ground investigation works.

Burt’s core skills include the design, specification and construction supervision of earthworks, highway pavement and railway foundations, earthwork material suitability assessment, ground treatment and site investigation. She also has experience of land reclamation and co-authored guidance on the use of stabilisation/solidification with the Environment Agency.

Burt plays a key role in the Arup Ground Engineering Skills Network as global learning champion. This includes liaising with members and leaders across the global network to develop and maintain courses, maximising information, sharing and updating the learning path for the 800+ strong global Arup geotechnical community.

She is also a long-standing member of the Birmingham office charity committee and supports Arup’s equality, diversity and inclusion committee initiatives, such as collecting pledges of support for the LGBTQ+ community and distributing rainbow lanyards.

Outside of Arup, Burt is known in the local geotechnical community for her 20 years+ role supporting the Midland Geotechnical Society, helping organise its monthly talks and specialist seminars.

Chaido (Yuli) Doulala-Rigby

Chief civil engineer, Tensar

Chaido (Yuli) Doulala-Rigby is a chartered engineer, a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the first civilian Fellow of the Institution of Royal Engineers, a Liveryman and Court Assistant of the Worshipful Company of Engineers, a Fellow of the Permanent Way Institution (FPWI), a member of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (MHKIE), and a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (Stem) ambassador. She is also an elected ICE council member, an appointed board member of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering, and the vice chair of the British Geotechnical Association (BGA), scheduled to serve as the BGA chair in 2025-2027. As well as being chief engineer at Tensar, she is also its international global technical ambassador.

Doulala-Rigby graduated from Newcastle University in 1994 with an MSc in rock mechanics and foundation engineering. After graduating she joined Balfour Beatty/AMEC JV as a tunnel monitoring engineer working on the Jubilee Line Extension Project in London. In 1996, she moved to Hong Kong, working for Maunsell (now Aecom) and then Mouchel Asia Limited (now Meinhardt), before returning to the UK in 2005 to work for Mott MacDonald, before joining Tensar in April 2006.

Doulala-Rigby’s technical specialism is in geosynthetics, and she is an advocate of innovative and sustainable engineering solutions

She lists her career highlight, so far, as delivering one of the tallest geogrid reinforced soil walls in the world in Fujairah, UAE, to form highway embankments with a cumulative tiered height up to 60m in 2011.

Doulala-Rigby is passionate about the promotion of geosynthetics in construction industry and works hard to encourage the involvement of young people and women in civil engineering.

Katherine Evans

Founder, Bold as Brass

Mining geologist Katherine Evans is the founder of the award-winning Bold as Brass network on LinkedIn. It brings together more than 1,000 women – and 1,400 individuals overall – working in the mining, energy, highways, rail, construction, engineering and environmental sectors.

Evans has worked offshore as a mudlogger, underground and in opencast settings as a mining geologist, in quarries as a geotechnical engineer, and as a consultant for an engineering company. She now owns her own consultancy - Bold as Brass Consultancy Services - where she specialises in gender equity, personal protective equipment (PPE) and culture change based on the information she has gathered from women and companies in mining, ground engineering and construction.

Evans is passionate about creating a feeling of tribal camaraderie throughout heavy industry sectors. The aim is to create psychologically safe workspaces, united workforces, and a collaborative focus on community net gain for those people who give up the most to allow the UK to reach its sustainability targets.

Evans is behind the PPE Revolution campaign to improve access to inclusive PPE, which has gone from strength to strength. She has worked with the Chartered Institute of Building to develop a directory of women's PPE, tested and trialled innovative products with PPE and workwear manufacturers, encouraged organisations to supply women's PPE, and lobbied politically for the legislation and standards to be amended to be more inclusive.

Evans also recently launched the Release the Bogs campaign to improve standards of and access to women’s site welfare facilities.

Sayantani Ghosh

Principal engineer, Langan International

Geotechnical engineer Sayantani Ghosh is based at Langan’s London office, where she works on stadia developments, luxury resorts, mixed-use facilities and supertall towers in the UK, KSA region and the New York metropolitan area.

Born and raised in India, Ghosh earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Durgapur in 2011, after which she began her career as a structural engineer. In 2014, she earned a master’s degree in geotechnical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, before moving to New York to work for Langan and then relocating to its London office in 2020.

Ghosh has more than 10 years of experience in deep foundations, rock and applied soil mechanics, earthquake engineering, in-situ testing and field instrumentation. Major projects that she has worked on include the American Museum of Natural History Gilder Center, Brooklyn Methodist Hospital and Neom.

Ghosh has been actively involved with the Deep Foundations Institute as a member of the Women in Deep Foundations Committee. Commercial Real Estate Women (Crew) UK elected her to a board member position for 2024, with a focus on advancing women in the commercial real estate industry. She was recently also chosen as one of 75 Influential Indian Women in Geotechnical Engineering by the Indian Geotechnical Society.

She is also a champion in mentoring and developing staff and young engineers around the globe, by taking the time to pass along her technical knowledge.

Stephanie Glendinning

Professor of civil engineering, Newcastle University

Stephanie Glendinning is the pro vice chancellor for the Faculty of Science Agriculture and Engineering (Sage) at Newcastle University. She provides academic leadership, with responsibility for strategic directions and priorities, and the investment in people, facilities and buildings. Sage is one of the biggest faculties in the UK with more than 8,000 students and 1,200 staff across four schools in the UK and one in Singapore.

She previously held the role of dean of strategic projects, bringing together academia and industry to create research facilities that address global sustainability challenges, including the Urban Sciences Building.

Glendinning gained a PhD in geotechnical engineering from Loughborough University and began her career at Newcastle University in 1998 as a lecturer in geotechnical engineering.

She has specialised in infrastructure research, including the challenge that climate change poses to critical geotechnical assets, specifically long-life, long-linear infrastructure. Glendinning stated on this path by designing and operating the Bionics Research Embankment Facility from 2004, a one-of-a-kind testbed for monitoring slope stability-related behaviour, for example, weather-slope interaction and geophysicical methods, as well as pioneering remediation approaches. She was a founding director of Elecktrokinetic, originating as a spin-off company at Newcastle University. Later, she formed and led the £1.6M iSMART consortium of eight institutions, ultimately going on to develop and lead the most recent, impactful £4.9M Achilles Programme onto success, working alongside major asset owner/operators, including Network Rail, Environment Agency, HS2 and National Highways, and their consultants, including Mott MacDonald, Arup and Jacobs.

Luisa Hendry

Senior engineering geologist, Story Contracting

Luisa Hendry is currently working for Story Contracting, project managing small to medium sized ground investigations across Scotland and North England. She has worked her way up quickly within the ground investigation industry, from a graduate engineer to senior in six years.

Hendry’s most recent experience includes the planning and management of ground investigation projects, between £100k to £11M in value, for clients including Transport Scotland, HS2 Ltd and Network Rail.

She took over a principal engineering geologist’s role on site as technical manager back in 2018 on the A82: Tarbert to Inveranan Detailed Ground investigation, worth £3.6M. This gave her the opportunity to progress and develop her career over a short period of time and she was able to use her technical abilities to effectively complete the project.

In her spare time, she is also sharing her passion for and knowledge of geology with the general public through social media. She has gained 340k followers over the last 11 months across platforms, with her content reaching more than 3M people each month.

Hendry is very knowledgeable, approachable and honest when communicating information, which makes it easy for people to comprehend. She always does her best to demonstrate both her enthusiasm and passion for her career and the subject of geology. She remains committed to her career and to engaging the next generation of geoscientists and engineers, both for Story Contracting and outside the workplace.

She can be found under the handle @ScottishGeologist on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn, and and @ScotGeologist on X.

Hollie Hood

Principal geotechnical engineer, Bam Ritchies

Hollie Hood joined Bam Ritchies as a graduate geotechnical engineer and has gone from strength to strength in her career due to her strong work ethic. In her work, she demonstrates both technical and leadership skills that belie her age and relatively short time within the industry.

Hood successfully led and delivered slope stabilisation works on the nine day Bearstead rail blockade, the largest blockade ever undertaken in the UK. The works were delivered safely and ahead of programme in a high pressure environment. More recently, she led work at Hinkley Point C, where Bam Ritchies undertook some highly technical rock fissure grouting within the cooling water tunnels that extend 3km out underneath the Bristol Channel. The works required interdisciplinary collaboration across all stakeholders as the process was tweaked in response to the effectiveness of the grouting works in different areas. The works were also undertaken around the clock in a difficult working environment. The project was shortlisted for the 2023 Fleming Award.

Hood continues is actively involved in the company’s drive for business improvement. She has recently written a new departmental management plan, which is making a real difference in raising the bar for health, safety and quality within the geotechnical business. She embraces change and has shown a real, genuine compassion for her peers and reports in the business, engaging them in the ongoing journey of making ground engineering an attractive sector to be a part of.

Sally Hudson

Regional director, Coffey Geotechnics

Sally Hudson has 35 years of industry experience, starting with Soil Mechanics in 1989 after gaining her bachelor’s degree in geology. During the early stages of her career, she gained practical experience on site investigation projects, and later obtained a master's degree in engineering geology from Imperial College London.

She has worked for design consultancies on many transport and energy infrastructure schemes and has more recently concentrated on earthworks design schemes and asset management in the road, rail and energy sectors.

For the last 21 years, she has been with the consultant Coffey Geotechnics, a Tetra Tech Company, previously Webber Associates, based in North Yorkshire, rising from senior engineer to regional director. In her current role she is responsible for the technical and operations management of the Coffey workload in the north-east and is also a member of the Coffey Geotechnics UK leadership team with particular responsibility for business development and heading up the IMS team.

Hudson has also been active with the Association of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Specialists (AGS) since 2013, initially within the Business Practice Working Group and then as chair of the association for 2021-2023 – the first woman in the role since the AGS was formed in 1988. Hudson has also been a chartership assessor for the Geological Society of London since 2010 and a chartership committee member from 2015 to 2020.

Through her role with the AGS Hudson has been active in promoting the geotechnical industry and recognising that it should be made more attractive to a wide range of entrants. She has been instrumental in the AGS plans for inclusivity and outreach to universities and schools.

Ursula Lawrence

Technical director of engineering geology, WSP UK

Ursula Lawrence is a chartered geologist, with a PhD in civil engineering from the University of Surrey. She has 35 years of experience working in ground engineering, beginning in local government before moving into consultancy, where she gained experience with several large companies.

In 2006, she started working for Crossrail Ltd, with responsibility for the southeastern section of the route. Her areas of technical specialism included construction dewatering and UXO risk management. This experience led to numerous presentations to both lay and technical audiences on the background to large infrastructure projects, including undergraduate lectures on geological topics such as the geology of the London Basin and drift filled hollows

Lawrence is very active in the promotion of engineering geology. In 2006, she joined the committee of the Engineering Group of the Geological Society through which she became an established figure, organising three conferences. Additionally, she was a committee member of the Southeast Regional Group from 2008 to 2021, helping to organise events, and more recently is involved in two Engineering Group Special Publication Working Parties. She served as the group’s chair between 2020-2022 and is assistant editor of the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology.

Lawrence joined Capita’s Ground Engineering team in 2012, moving over to WSP in September 2022.

She provides ongoing and enthusiastic support to the next generation through chartership mentoring and technical leadership.

Last year, Lawrence received the Geological Society of London’s Engineering Group Award.

Christina Mavrommati

Project director in geotechnics, metros and civil division, Mott MacDonald

Christina Mavrommati is a MICE chartered geotechnical engineer with a BEng Hons degree from University College London and an MSc in soil mechanics and engineering seismology from Imperial College London.

Pursuing a career as a "hands on" engineer was a conscious decision for Mavrommati. She wanted a creative and challenging job that was a bit out of the ordinary.

Mavrommati has been working in geotechnical engineering for more than 22 years, both in the UK and in Greece. She has worked as a designer and team leader on large-scale civil engineering projects, including High Speed 2 (HS2), Crossrail 2, Doha Metro Major Stations, Thames Tideway Tunnel, Athens and Thessaloniki Metro, Egnatia Motorway and Network Rail Wessex Capacity Upgrade.

Currently, Mavrommati a resource manager,  equality, inclusion and diversity champion, and a member of the senior leadership team of the foundations and geotechnics principal account of the metros and civil division at Mott MacDonald.

She is team leader and delivery and integration manager for the 200-plus-strong HS2 MWCC N1N2 geotechnical team. Over the past four years, she has delivered technically complex solutions to geotechnical designs by leading this diverse, multicultural and multi-disciplined team with expert communication skills and the keenest eye for detail that ensures successful and timely results every time.

Mavrommati is also an elected member of the BGA committee and served as a team mentor in the very first GE Early Careers Challenge.

Catherine Mills

Technical director and South East regional director, Arcadis

Catherine Mills is a chartered engineer and Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers with more than 20 years of experience in the geotechnical industry. At Arcadis, she has focused on major project delivery both in the UK and overseas.

Throughout her career, Mills has tackled technically complex projects, driven digital innovation from inception and sought novel, sustainable solutions. She has played a pivotal role in some of the world's largest infrastructure projects, including Taiwan High-Speed Rail, Crossrail, High Speed 2 and the iconic Burj Khalifa.

She serves as a strong female leadership role model for Arcadis’ geotechnical business and is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion. She is passionate about the retention and promotion of women in the engineering discipline and actively contributes to wider industry discussions and panels in this area.

Mills is also the mentoring lead for the Arcadis Women in Mobility group, which includes 200 women in the UK business. She is working to coordinate and connect early and mid-career female engineers with senior leaders within the business. This mentoring programme works to build confidence, facilitate networking opportunities, and establish longer-term development bonds between participants, mentors and mentees. Her leadership and drive have been critical to the development and success of this programme. This is due to Mills’ position as a technical director within a large consultancy, her strong analytical capability, technical leadership and project delivery capability.

Tracey Radford

Technical director and practice manager, Atkins Réalis

Tracey Radford is a chartered geologist, with an MSc in geohazard assessment from the University of Portsmouth. She has been with Atkins Réalis for more than 20 years, joining as a graduate and working her way up to technical director and practice manager for the London and South East Ground Engineering and Tunnelling practice, providing strategic direction and oversight to a 160 strong £17M revenue business. She is the chair of its global Geotechnical Technical Network and also the global geotechnical and tunnelling capability lead, as well as former chair of the Engineering Group of the Geological Society.

Radford is also a supporter of early career engineers and women in the industry. She set up the Ground Engineering and Tunnel Academy over 12 years ago which hosts over 100 early careers running training events including their renowned annual field trip. She also runs continuous professional development and training events throughout the year. She’s also a highly successful CGeol mentor and assessor, having mentored many women through the chartership process.

Radford’s technical specialism is engineering geology and the conceptualisation and characterisation of the ground for preliminary and detailed design. She has worked on various projects, including the redevelopment of Colchester Garrison, the Tel Aviv Mass Transit System, A21 Tonbridge to Pembury dualling, High Speed 2 and more recently providing project oversight on various offshore wind developments.

Emily Riley

Project manager, WJ Groundwater

A degree in oceanography is not the obvious way to launch a career in ground engineering, but it has given Emily Riley a wider perspective of both the industry and associated environmental issues. She now has around eight years of postgraduate experience, including an MSc in engineering geology from Birmingham University. She recently achieved CEng MICE status and has set up a chartership club to support and encourage others on the road to chartership.

Riley has both consulting and contracting experience on major projects such as Thames Tideway East, working for contractor CVBJV, and Silvertown Tunnel, working for specialist contractor WJ Groundwater.

On Tideway, she was involved in investigating a drift-filled hollow that impacted a tunnel boring machine drive, which led to her co-authoring a paper on ground investigation sonic drilling for the Chalk 2018 conference. She then moved directly on to Tideway East shaft construction, with a focus on groundwater control and management of legacy contamination.

Riley is a recent past chair of the British Geotechnical Association (BGA) Early Career Group and was also a committee member of the Engineering Group of the Geological Society. She won the BGA Cooling Prize in 2021, which is the association’s top prize for young professionals. Her entry detailed a close encounter with a water-bearing fissure in one of the Tideway shafts. In addition to Chalk 2018, she had her paper published at the recent International Conference on Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering in Australia, which is rare for a young professional not in academia.

Hilary Shields

Associate technical specialist director, Tony Gee and Partners

Hilary Shields graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1988 and has been in engineering for at least 35 years. She spent the first four years with consultant Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners, working on the challenging Limehouse Link project in London and a large infrastructure project in Libya.

She then spent seven years working as a research scientist at the BRE, including research on insitu test devices and developing empirical based design solutions for shallow and piled foundations.

Following completion of an MSc in soil mechanics at Imperial College, she joined Arup’s geotechnical team in London, where she led geotechnical work on a wide range of projects in the UK and overseas. She moved over to Tony Gee and Partners in 2023.

Shields has held a lead design role in a wide range of significant and innovative ground engineering projects including Channel Tunnel Rail Link’s London to Folkestone Section, the iconic new Qatar National Museum, Nile Corniche, 52 Lime Street/the Scalpel, and 120 Fenchurch Street, to name a few.

Shields is extensively published and holds positions on a range of industry working groups. She is a chartered civil engineer and has been a highly active ICE delegated engineer supporting a large number of trainees through to achieving professionally qualified status. Throughout her work, Shields has prioritised deep technical understanding, guiding others, inspiring and mentoring early career staff and going out of her way to care for the team around her.

Hilary Skinner

Director, Cowi

Hilary Skinner has a master’s in engineering from the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. She was also chair of the British Geotechnical Association (BGA) between 2007 and 2009.

Skinner has almost 30 years’ experience working on projects in the UK and abroad. She is accomplished in the development of unique, practical solutions using a strong research background. Her high quality contribution has been recognised through awards and industry reliance on her publications. She was made an ICE Queen’s Jubilee Scholar and has won the ICE Geotechnical Research Medal and the Halcrow Prize.

Skinner has almost 25 peer reviewed technical papers. She was an editor of the ICE Manual of Geotechnical Engineering, and has produced industry guidance for working platforms, tower cranes and re-using foundations.

Skinner has been a soil mechanics tutor for the Royal School of Military Engineering MSc course in military construction engineering and has been a regular presenter at conferences and various geotechnical groups on developments in piling. She has been a research board member for projects into continuous flight auger piling, instrumentation, rapid load testing, foundation re-use and geosynthetics.

Skinner started her career at research body BRE and led its geotechnical division. She also spent time at Ramboll Whitby Bird, before joining Donaldson Associates, which later became Cowi. She continues to work on technically challenging projects, giving the highest quality technical guidance and leadership.

Jessica T Smith

Senior engineering geologist and technical authority, SSE Renewables

Chartered geologist Jessica T Smith is SSE Renewable’s technical authority for engineering geology on its proposed Coire Glas pumped storage hydro scheme.

She completed her undergraduate degree in Earth science at the University of Glasgow in 2004 and then obtained her MSc in engineering geology at Imperial College London. Smith grew up in a single-parent, low-income household and was the first in her family to attend university.

Smith chairs a Geological Society working group that is reviewing its governance documents and structure. Following election to the society’s council as a trustee in 2017, she held the position of vice president from 2019 to 2022.

She also co-authored Ciria’s recently published “Natural slopes and landslides – condition, assessment, and mitigation (C810)” guide.

Smith’s career has been varied, including leading on rock cutting design for the A9 Dualling Dalraddy to Slochd scheme; inspection and remediation of the unlined Loch Katrine aqueducts that supply Glasgow’s drinking water; inspection and design of rock slope stabilisation of cliffs above the Unesco site Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar; and the EU research project Safeland: Living with landslide risk in Europe: Assessment, effects of global change and risk management strategies.

Smith views working to create a better, more inclusive and sustainable ground engineering sector as a significant part of her day-to-day job. During her time at Atkins, Smith was a founding member of the Ground Engineering & Tunnelling practice’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion group. At SSE Renewables, she is also part of its Inclusion and Diversity Challenger Group.

Katerina Tsiampousi

Geotechnics senior lecturer, Imperial College London

Katerina Tsiampousi completed her undergraduate studies in civil engineering at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2005. She obtained an MSc in soil mechanics in 2006 and a PhD in geotechnics in 2011 from Imperial College London.

Since 2013, Tsiampousi has been a senior lecturer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College. Following a period as the director of the Geotechnics MSc, she is now the director of the entire suite of MSc courses in the Department. She is an elected member of the British Geotechnical Association executive committee, a nominated member of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering technical committee on unsaturated soils and an associate editor of Geotechnique.

Tsiampousi has led and contributed to a number of research grants funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. She was also a key member of the organising committee of the highly successful NUMGE 2023 conference.

Tsiampousi continues to deliver high quality research on the topic of unsaturated soil. This has been recognised in a 2017 editor’s choice award from the Canadian Geotechnical Journal and a 2015 President’s medal at Imperial College.

Tsiampousi clearly sees her role as director of the MSc programme as a way to transform taught postgraduate teaching in geotechnics in the UK. She has led the introduction of a new MSc stream on data science and is currently coordinating new additional MSc streams that will better meet the industry’s needs over the coming years.

Charlotte Woodhall-Jones

Discipline lead ground engineering, Systra

Charlotte Woodhall-Jones is a chartered geologist and a chartered civil engineer. She has more than 20 years of industry experience in the public and private sectors, as a designer and asset owner. She has worked on major road and rail projects such as the East Leeds Orbital Route and recently opened Ebbw Vale Rail Enhancement project, South Wales, both of which have had a positive impact on local communities.

She joined Systra in December 2022 as the discipline lead for ground engineering, responsible for more than 40 geotechnical engineers and engineering geologists in the delivery of major transportation schemes, overseeing operations and work winning. Woodhall-Jones’ team is currently delivering lots N1 and N2 of the High Speed 2 project as part of a design joint venture, and the northern Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU East) between Leeds and York.

Within a year of joining Systra, Woodhall-Jones has transformed her team into a connected, energised and forward-looking unit. She established progressive workshops for her team to understand and celebrate differences in social and learning styles to ensure that colleagues with neurodivergent traits do not feel marginalised. She has spearheaded several internal initiatives, setting up working groups on sustainability, engineering geology and structural geotechnics, and digital innovation, to upskill and develop staff.

Woodhall-Jones is passionate about equality and diversity in the workplace, bringing her whole genuine self to work as a role model for future engineers. She wants to be an example for all working parents, specifically mothers, showing that senior leadership positions are possible on a flexible working contract. Her performance as discipline lead was recognised internally by Systra; she was shortlisted in the Living our Values - Bold Leadership category and her team was highly commended in the Team of the Year 2023 – Practice Technical category.

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