We are delighted to announce that Professor Linda Newnes, who leads the TREND group, has been elected as President of the International Society of Transdisciplinary Engineering. This appointment recognises her commitment and the contribution she has made in advancing the field. For those of you who are not aware of Linda, here is some background:
Linda is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her research focus is on whole-life value analysis (monetary, environmental and societal costs) from concept design through to the in-service/in-use phases. Core to determining value, is her work in engineering design and manufacturing where she specializes in Transdisciplinary Engineering. She leads a £1.8M, UKRI, EPSRC grant on TRansdisciplinary ENgineering Design (TREND), which aims to provide industry with the tools to enable effective transdisciplinary working. She has published over 100 refereed papers, supervised numerous PhD students and has had continual research funding since 1991 with a mix of small less than £500K targeted projects through to being a part of multi-million-pound consortiums.
All of her research is industry focused, and her impacts have created benefits and value to aerospace, defense, medical device design, oil and gas, green technologies, utilities to name a few. Her research has evidenced cost savings of 63% through trade-off analysis between specification and cost for medical products, identified cost-benefit analysis for the adoption of renewables in oil-rich countries, enabled business model creation for innovation within the utilities sectors and created cost/time models for evolving in-service support within the aerospace sector. Through her industry Partnerships and Whole Life Value modelling, the need for Transdisciplinary working had been identified as essential to assist in the challenges faced by industry today.
Typical industrial linked projects include:
- Data analytics - automotive design - the 'real' cost of change
- TRansdisciplinary ENgineering Design - TREND assisting industry to have the right tools, people and processes for Transdisciplinary working.
- Transdisciplinary working in the automotive sector.
- Socio-technical system models for Future Manufacturing.
- Whole-Life Value - creating evolving whole life value models from cradle-to-cradle.
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