Keynote Speakers

Professor Andrew Garrard

Professor of Engineering Education & Head of Multidisciplinary Engineering Education

https://sheffield.ac.uk/engineering/diamond-engineering/our-staff/andrew-garrard

Experiments under the microscope: Why do we teach lab classes and do they have a place in a world with AI?

If you were to ask engineering academics whether they thought it was important to include lab classes in a degree programme, there would likely be overwhelming agreement that it was. If you were to dig a little deeper and ask why they thought labs were so important, you would receive a multitude of different justifications. In this talk, we explore the history of practical engineering education, the seminal publications on the subject, and the predominantly cited expected learning outcomes from labs. The Covid-19 pandemic provided the ultimate empirical test of the justification for the continued delivery of the contemporary engineering lab class by removing learners' access to physical experimental equipment. Despite the ubiquity of the uninvited disruption and the realisation of the efficiency gains achievable with remote learning, as Covid restrictions were lifted, the business of teaching engineering labs (mostly) reverted to the same traditional formats that have been employed for decades. Is this due to academics’ clichéd resistance to change or a case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? This question can be answered by considering the universally agreed importance of lab classes in an engineering curriculum and what students gain from the experiences of working together, investigating the phenomena of the natural world. This also provides a model to predict the relevance of the practical lab class in a world where AI will be increasingly dominant in higher education, where HE is under increasingly constrained funding, and where big data reduces the need for engineers to understand the nature of complex systems.

Biography

Andrew Garrard is a Professor of Engineering Education. He cut his teeth in teaching as a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University in 2009 before taking up a role at the University of Sheffield to help deliver the ambitious new teaching-focused engineering building, the Diamond. The building houses multidisciplinary teaching labs, and Andrew is the head of a group of 50 staff who work in those labs and are focused entirely on practical education. Andrew has been called upon for his expertise in practical engineering teaching at scale and started the Practical Engineering Education Conference in 2021. 

If you want more bio info it is here: https://sheffield.ac.uk/engineering/diamond-engineering/our-staff/andrew-garrard

Professor Raffaella Ocone, OBE FREng, FRSE

Professor Outcome-Based Education in Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society 

President of the  Institution for Chemical Engineers 

https://www.hw.ac.uk/profiles/uk/school/egis/faculty/raffaella-ocone

https://rse.org.uk/whats-on/exhibition/women-science-exhibition/professor-raffaella-ocone/

https://www.icheme.org/about-us/strategy-and-leadership/board-of-trustees/raffaella-ocone/

The role of Engineering Education and IChemE on shaping Engineering Future Skills  

The energy transition presents a once-in-a-century opportunity to engineer a more sustainable world. Meeting this challenge will require not only technological innovation, but also the development of new skills for the next generation of engineers.

This talk will explore the skills that will shape the future of chemical engineering, drawing on work undertaken during Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) presidency, including insights from surveys, roundtable discussions, and the presidential inquiry launched last month into the state of chemical engineering research.

The findings highlight both the uncertainty surrounding the skills likely to be in greatest demand over the coming decade and the clear consensus on the growing importance of problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, adaptability, systems thinking and practice. Future engineers will need to work effectively across disciplinary and organisational boundaries, requiring a broader and more integrated skill set than ever before.

Universities and professional bodies therefore have a vital role to play in embedding these capabilities within education and professional development programmes, helping to shape and support the profession through this rapidly evolving transition.

Biography

Raffaella Ocone OBE FREng FRSE studied chemical engineering at the University of Naples Federico II before completing her MA and PhD at Princeton University. She holds a degree honoris causa from the University of Surrey.

Since 1999, Raffaella has been Professor of Chemical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University, becoming the first woman to hold a chair in chemical engineering in Scotland. Her research advances the modelling of complex reactive and multiphase systems, supporting innovations in carbon capture, sustainable hydrogen production, and other technologies critical to the energy transition.

In 2017, she became the first Caroline Herschel Visiting Professor in Engineering at Ruhr University, in recognition of her contributions to engineering ethics; the same year she was appointed Cavaliere of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity by the President of the Italian Republic. In 2019, she was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to engineering and was named one of the Top 100 Most Influential Women in Engineering. In 2025, she became the 84th President of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE). In 2026 she was elected to the prestigious Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze detta dei XL (Italian National Academy of Sciences).

Beyond her research, Raffaella is a strong advocate for ethics in engineering and for increasing diversity and inclusion in STEM, particularly encouraging more women to pursue engineering careers.

If you want more info: https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/raffaella-ocone/

Professor Timothy Drysdale

Chair in Technology Enhanced Science Education

https://eng.ed.ac.uk/about/people/professor-timothy-drysdale

Near-Future Practical Work - Digitisation, Industry and Student Experience 

The intersection of external developments in artificial intelligence, industry practice and higher education sector finances make for challenging times in engineering education. They also invite optimism about changes that not only future proof our approaches but also address latent issues. At the heart of the issue is the increasing digitalisation of engineering, brought about initially by the development of electronic control systems, then digital computers, then high-bandwidth low-latency networking which allows for remote operation. Adjusting to operating in a hands-off environment is non-trivial, and in my view, requires addressing explicitly in our curriculum. Further, our increasingly constrained resources and growing student numbers have constrained many to cook-book laboratories, often with strict time pressure. Much of the work is then done unsupervised, to produce a laboratory report. With the widespread emergence of generative artificial intelligence, I argue that focusing on written proxies for engineering behaviour is no longer sufficient. Instead we should directly analyse engineering activity and seek engineering behaviours, such as iterative improvement. This is not possible in a cost effective manner using traditional in-person teaching methods, but becomes practical at scale when digital data streams are available, such as from data flowing between students and remote laboratories. Linking these behaviours to the requirements of industry is a further challenge, because of the diversity of requirements that future employers have. However, we can do well to be informed of characteristics that apply more generally, and I will discuss two different existing sources of this information and speculate about how we might go about integrating it into the practical work of the near future. 

Biography

Timothy D. Drysdale received the B.E. (1st Class Hons., University Prize) and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1999 and 2004, respectively. From 2002 -- 2005 he was a Post Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Electronics   and   Electrical   Engineering, University  of  Glasgow, Glasgow, U.K, and from 2005 -- 2006 a Scottish Executive / Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Research Fellow in the same. From 2006 -- 2015 he was a Lecturer in the Electronics Design Centre at the University of Glasgow. 

From 2015-2018, he was a Senior Lecturer in Engineering at the Open University, Milton Keynes, U.K. where he was the Founding Director and Lead Developer of the Open Engineering Laboratory which was recognised by awards including the Times Higher Education Outstanding Digital Innovation 2017, The Guardian Teaching Excellence 2018, Global Online Labs Consortium Remote Experiment Award 2018, National Instruments Global Engineering Impact Award for Education 2018, and a Queen's Anniversary Prize in 2023. 

Since 2018 he has been the Chair of Technology Enhanced Science Education in the School of Engineering, where he currently also holds the role of Director of Strategic Digital Education. He is the founder of the \texttt{practable.io} remote laboratory system which won the Association for Learning Technology/ Jisc Digital Transformation Award in 2023 and Global Online Labs Consortium Remote Experiment Award in 2024. He is an Associate Editor of IET Microwave Antennas and Propagation, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and his public engagement work has included the  Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, Science Day at Buckingham Palace, and the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Award Lecture at the British Science Festival.

If you want more bio info it is here: https://eng.ed.ac.uk/about/people/professor-timothy-drysdale