Academic named among UK’s leading female engineers

A world-leading authority on offshore renewable energy, Professor Deborah Greaves OBE, has been named as one of the country’s leading female engineers.

Professor Greaves, Head of the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics at the University of Plymouth, has been listed by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) among its Top 50 Women in Engineering: Sustainability.

The awards celebrate women who have made a significant contribution within sustainability, and nominations were required to provide evidence of their successful support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals or the Net Zero Carbon Programme.

Professor Greaves has been working in the sector for more than two decades and has pioneered the development of novel types of wave energy converter, analysis methods for offshore renewable energy farms, and extreme wave-structure interactions, while combining hydrodynamics experiments in the University’s COAST Laboratory with numerical modelling.

Since arriving in Plymouth in 2008, she has continued to cement her position as one of the UK’s foremost offshore renewable energy researchers, having secured more than £10million in research funding.

She has led a number of national and international research initiatives, and provided expert advice to organisations including the United Nations, European Union and the UK government.

She was selected by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to head the Supergen ORE Hub, a £9milion programme pulling together leading figures in wave, tidal and offshore wind to share skills and expertise to address the many synergies and research challenges.

She was made an OBE in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours List, in recognition of her significant contributions to research into offshore renewable energy and her work to inspire more women and girls to consider a career in engineering.