IED names new President Elect

The Institution of Engineering Designers is very excited to announce that Mandy Chessell CBE FREng HonFIED has agreed to become the IED’s President Elect. She will be taking on the position of Honorary President at the AGM in July.

Mandy is a computer scientist and a former distinguished engineer at IBM, and was the first woman to be awarded a Silver Medal by the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Mandy joined IBM in 1987. Her early work focused on distributed transaction processing. She then moved on to work on event management, business-process modelling and outside-in design, before developing model-driven tools to simplify the analysis and design of large systems and then to automate their development. This work covered the development of user interfaces, services, information-integration technology in the field of master data management.

Mandy’s more recent work has focused on data lake architectures, metadata management and information governance. She’s the lead of the Egeria open source project, which provides an open platform for metadata management, exchange and governance, as well as being a founder of Pragmatic Data Research.

Mandy has collected numerous accolades during her career, including:

2001: Winner of the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for the invention and engineering of reusable software component architecture.

2002: Elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

2004: Chosen as the British Computer Society’s nomination for the Women’s Engineering Society’s Karen Burt Memorial Award.

2006: Winner of a British Female Innovators and Inventors Network Female Inventor of the Year Award in the Building Capacity for Innovation category; winner of the Best Woman in the Corporate Sector award at the Blackberry Women in Technology awards.

2011: Made an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineering Designers.

2012: Winner of the Innovator of the Year award at the Cisco Everywoman in Technology Awards.

2013: Received an honorary Doctor of Science from Plymouth University.

2015: Received an honorary Doctorate of Technology from the University of Brighton; appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the New Year honours for services to engineering.

2016: Named in the Top 50 Influential Women in Engineering List 2016; received an honorary Doctorate of Technology from the University of South Wales.

2017: Received an Honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Bath.

Mandy has a career-long interest in design and improving the human interface with information technology and the IED Trustees are delighted that she has accepted their invitation to become Honorary President.

‘My association with the IED goes back to my election as an Honorary Fellow in 2011 and I’ve kept track of developments at the Institution and their promotion of design ever since,’ Mandy said. ‘I’m really pleased to be able to work more closely with the Institution and look forward to beginning my tenure as Honorary President.’