Gail Long Early Career Woman Engineer of the Year Award
Open award for members and non-members
Award criteria
Purpose: The purpose of this award is to recognise women at an early stage of their career in any field of NDT/CM/SHM and associated science, engineering and technologies. It aims to raise the profile of women in engineering, and of NDT and its related disciplines and industries, with a contribution over a period of at least 2-5 years.
The award highlights activity in the following areas: contribution to the NDT/CM/SHM or wider engineering community; contribution in research, education, technological innovation; and the promotion and practice of NDT/CM/SHM. Nominees can be active in any relevant sector or industry.
The award is named in honour of the late Gail Long, winner of the BINDT Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, who made a major contribution in the NDT community.
Details of the award: The award will consist of a certificate plus £300 cash/bank transfer, an invitation to either the NDT or CM Annual Conference Dinner and one night’s accommodation.
Eligibility: Nominees should have made a valuable contribution to the NDT/CM/SHM community, either through R&D, technology innovation, development or transfer, by developing strategies leading to new technology development and exploitation, by contribution to standards or by facilitating significant change in NDT/CM/SHM.
The suggested guideline on ‘early career’ is within 10-15 years of starting work as an engineer (excluding career breaks).
This is intended to recognise contributions over a period of at least 2-5 years.
The proposer of the award should be a voting member of the Institute. If they are not, they will need to ensure the application is endorsed by an Institute voting member.
Frequency: The prize will be awarded annually and will only be issued if suitable nominations are received.
Nomination arrangements: Nominations should be submitted by email to: karen.cambridge@bindt.org
Nominations for the award will be reviewed by the Membership, Qualification and Education (MQ&E) Committee. If there is only one nomination, then MQ&E should vote to confirm whether the nomination is eligible and, if so, to approve the award.
If there is more than one nomination, then the entries should be sent for judging by a panel set up for the purpose. Four members of the panel are to be appointed by MQ&E. Each judge will be invited to score the entries on a point scale of 0 to 3 and send the scores to Karen Cambridge, who will total the scores, and the entry receiving the most points will be declared the winner.
Awarding arrangements: The certificate and cash/bank transfer will be awarded to the winner at their choice of either the NDT or CM Annual Conference Dinner.
Committee: MQ&E and Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Group (DIAG).
Winners
2023 winner: Laura Hook (Hayday)
The winner of the Gail Long Early Career Woman Engineer of the Year Award for 2023 is Laura Hook (Hayday).After completing the Babcock Graduate Scheme as a Naval Architect in 2014, Laura went on to join the Babcock Devonport Welding & Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) department as a Research and Development (R&D) Engineer. Achieving Incorporated Engineer status in 2019, Laura then completed the University of Northampton Master’s degree in advanced industrial practice in NDT, achieving a distinction. Now as a Senior NDT R&D Engineer, Laura is leading a package of work for large-scale glass fibre-reinforced polymer (GFRP) composite structures, to develop the inspections, confirm technology limits and allow characterisation of indications. This builds on her previous work to define the complex composite structures into an inspection package.
Laura previously implemented a reduction to industrial radiography through Lloyd’s Register sign-off for the use of time-of-flight diffraction (TOFD) on >6 mm parent plate butt welds through extensive statistical analysis of sizing, sentencing outcome, characterisation for manual ultrasonic testing (UT), TOFD, phased array and radiography. It has continued to have use in industry for other projects where radiography delays need a quick save by Babcock’s NDT engineers.
To further build on technique development, Laura trained in using CIVA UT and this formed her Master’s thesis for the evaluation of simulated and experimental results on complex geometry welds for an ultrasonic phased array sectorial group. This project allowed exact comparison of different calibration settings (notches versus side-drilled holes (SDHs)) and modelling of defects that could be compared to experimental data from complex geometry test-pieces for linear and sectorial groups.
There have also been very positive results to bring in new suppliers of phased array units (Zetec), improvements to corrosion mapping, the use of phased array in water to reduce docking time, training delivery, customer engagement, additive manufacturing NDT and radiographic wet film digitisation trials.
Laura wishes to give special thanks to her colleagues, who will have all contributed in some way to these projects, either through report checking, data collection or project support.
Past winners:
2020 Dr Maria Felice and Rachael Southgate
2021 Samantha McInnes-Rankin
2022 Danielle Elizabeth Adams
A nomination form can be downloaded here.
Details of all Institute awards can be found here.
