Please introduce yourself and tell us about your career to date.
I’m a chartered fire engineer with over 30 years’ experience. After studying Fuel and Energy Engineering at the University of Leeds and completing a PhD in Fire Safety Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, I moved to Sydney in 1997—just as the performance-based building code was introduced and Olympic projects were kicking off. I joined Holmes Fire and Safety, leading their Sydney office, before moving to Arup.
At Arup, I spent 18 years in various roles including leading increasingly large parts of the business and sitting on the Australasia Region Board. I was awarded the honour of becoming an Arup Fellow, which recognises technical and design excellence, for my work as a fire engineer.
In 2021, I briefly stepped away from fire engineering for a business management role but missed fire engineering. I now work as a contractor to Arup as Principal Fire Engineer, focusing on projects and leading fire engineering delivery as Project Director.
Describe your role or position within your current workplace and describe what a typical working day looks like.
My typical working day is primarily project and technically focussed. This includes everything from meeting with clients and writing fee proposals, to testing and commissioning on site as we finish a building or piece of infrastructure. As a Project Director, I am very involved in the early concept stage, making sure that we understand the goals and needs. Also, my role is to ensure that we are thinking holistically about the design, ideating, liaising with the design team, and supporting the fire engineers on the project as we come up with ideas and solve any problems which may arise.
As we are always doing a few projects at once, every day never looks the same. A typical day could involve brainstorming a design or potential problems, going to a design meeting, talking to a client, or reviewing a report. It can also involve sitting with a team member to talk through the next steps on a project, going to a site inspection, and doing some research on a particular area of a project.
As a senior professional, I like to find time to mentor and help provide guidance, or even just a different perspective, for my colleagues and industry friends.
Are there any particular challenges or unusual aspects to your role?
Fire engineering impacts on every discipline in a design team, including the builder, owners, operators and users of buildings and infrastructure, and that makes it an interesting job. We need to be good at communicating and understanding everyone’s different needs, and finding better ways to engage with each other, particularly as people meet face to face far less than before.
I am lucky enough to have a wide variety of projects to work on, each providing very different challenges. I also enjoy how much the challenges keep evolving too, with new things to think about such as batteries in e-bikes, BESS, timber buildings, increasing mixed use buildings, new technologies, sustainability and much more.
What do you find most enjoyable about your job?
People, problem solving, and coming up with design ideas. I think we underestimate how much positive impact we get from work, from being amongst smart people, from the social network that our colleagues provide, and from the boost to our self-esteem that comes from solving problems.
I do think too that we are incredibly privileged in that we get to create tangible outcomes, buildings and infrastructure that benefit the community, and in many cases will outlive us.
Is there a great professional achievement or high-profile accomplishment that you would like to tell us about in a previous role or your current one?
Probably my highest profile project was the Beijing Watercube, the aquatic centre for the 2008 Olympic Games. It was an incredible, challenging project, that became such a favourite of both the community and of the 2008 Games. We won the UK MacRobert Award for Innovation in Engineering for it, which came with a prize of £50,000 and we used the prize money to take everyone who had worked for more than a week on the project to Beijing to see the Watercube (the design team had been based in Sydney, but our delivery partners in Beijing took the project through construction). It was a hugely proud and humbling experience for all of us.
What inspired you to become an engineer or pointed you towards an engineering career?
I was pretty good across the board at school, including in maths and science, but because I was a female, the teachers all encouraged me to think about careers in the humanities. I had a stubborn streak even then so when it was suggested that engineering was for boys, I became determined to do that!
What contributed to your decision to gain IFE membership / become professionally registered?
Registration is really important. If we want to be viewed as a credible profession, then we need professional standards, safeguards and ethics, continuing professional development, and all the things that come with a professional membership organisation. A benchmark for competency is critical for holding ourselves to account and to provide the community with a level of surety in our competence. It also means that someone failing to live up to these standards can be removed from the ‘club’ to protect the public.
How have you benefitted from being a member/registrant with the IFE (career, personally)?
I think the greatest benefit I get is from the knowledge sharing across the broader fire safety community. I am a better fire engineer when I can see things from a wider perspective and I learn a lot from talking to firefighters and fire service management, as well as engaging with engineers in fire testing. The IFE brings all these broad fire safety professions together, and that makes us all better.
Are you involved in the IFE in any other capacity (e.g. branch, volunteer, with a SIG)? If you are, could you tell us a bit more about that?
I am the Ordinary Director (fire engineering) for IFE Australia and have been for the last year. I have been involved in helping pull together conference speakers as well as provide content and webinars. I have also been involved in a mentoring scheme in addition to a governance working group. I get a huge amount of pleasure from working with the IFE Australia board which comes with lots of learning allowing me to stretch my thinking along with some good laughs, and friendship.
Would you recommend joining the IFE to others? If so, why?
Absolutely. The more we learn and share knowledge, the better our profession will be, the more we will be able to help the community. We will develop better designs, anticipate risks more, problem solve, and enjoy our work fully. The IFE offers this opportunity.
Is there any advice you would pass on to someone considering professional registration / IFE membership?
Do it now! Join at whatever level you can and then engage fully with every opportunity that comes along.