International Women in Engineering Day 2023

I am part of a team of 11 colleagues and oversee logistics, assembly and remanufacturing in our Power Systems division. This means that I am responsible for ensuring that the colleagues in these areas can work safely. To do this, we regularly do so-called safety walks, and we assess potential hazards. I also assess whether new production machines, for example, are safe for our employees. This spring, I organised a Global Safety Day at Rolls-Royce Power Systems with my colleagues to create more awareness around this topic. We sent out a communication package to all our entities providing them with relevant information on safety at work. It was very well received and successful.

I am French and I have been living in Germany for 8 years. I studied Occupational Safety and Environment in France and then came to Germany. I've been working as a Safety Engineer in Rolls-Royce's Power Systems Division for a year now and I feel right at home here.

As Chief Engineer, I'm accountable for all aspects of safety related to engines and services within a specific product portfolio. I've been with Rolls-Royce for almost 27 years and have held various roles across multiple businesses and programs, and product life cycle from business pursuit to fleet sustainment.

I coach, advise, and lead the engineering team to deliver product safety by ensuring that we follow our safety principles, requirements, and processes in all that we do - design, make, verify, release, and support of our products in service. We identify potential safety concerns, perform safety investigations, and we take action to mitigate safety issues/concerns to ALARP levels, also ensuring lessons learned to prevent future concerns or occurrences. Together with our customers, we ensure our products are safe to operate.

I help facilitate my team with the resources and the tools to deliver product safety.

I have a degree in engineering and am a member of the IMechE. I’ve worked for Rolls-Royce my whole career in a varied set of roles. I spent a significant number of years in large engine development, involved in the certification of several Trent engines, including supporting flight test abroad and leading teams to deliver compliance tests, analysis, and documentation. I also spent a brief time in programme management, leading a global IT project, before spending 7 years in Quality, leading the investigation of quality concerns and driving continuous improvements to improve overall Quality of our products before moving back into an engineering role as a member of the Airworthiness Team, specialising in the Safety Management System.

I make Rolls-Royce products safe by being a safety conscience of the business. Driving a strong safety culture by role modelling the right behaviours and embedding them into the way we work and ensuring compliance to the industry regulations.

My team and I are responsible for increasing the capability of Rolls-Royce to determine the safe life spans of critical engine hardware. In this role, safety is at the forefront as we support our engine programs in delivering and maintaining safe products to military and civil customers across the globe. Engine safety is of the upmost importance to me personally as I have family members who fly aircraft in the military and depend on the reliability of our products.

As the mother of two young daughters, I am proud of showing the impact that women make through engineering at Rolls-Royce.

My current role is Chief Project Engineer for Trent Fleet Services, this means that I lead a team of engineers to design and manage over 1000 engines in service today. I have been at Rolls-Royce since I graduated in 2009 and through that time I have worked in different global locations and on a variety of different products leading engineering teams and solving problems, such as how to develop high temperature power electronics, how to turn an aero jet engine into an efficient power generation engine and most recently how to enhance the durability of the Trent 1000 Turbine blade.

Currently looking after a huge fleet of engines it is my primary goal every day to make sure that they continue to operate safely and continue to play their vital role in connecting people across the world. My team and I are always asking ourselves, what more can we do to be proactive to improve the safety of the product? It is also important that we have a culture of speaking up, supporting each other and making safety seen. I try to help us to learn when we do have a new finding by sharing in-service events with the wider business.

I also lead our Gender Diversity Network in the UK which aims to improve the Gender Balance at Rolls-Royce. Diversity of ideas and people is vital for ensuring that safety is seen and thought about. We need different voices to ensure that we can identify potential failure modes before they occur and then to find solutions for preventing them. It’s also important as leaders that we recognise that in sharing our different experiences as female engineers, we create a safe space for less experienced colleagues to learn and grow in a supportive environment - so they can be inspired to share their experiences now and with future generations.

I’m proud to say that while Rolls-Royce Electrical is driving novel technologies, we are following the Rolls-Royce processes for safety just as the other divisions across the company. In Electrical, we have a community of very experienced safety engineers that support the design each day with their knowledge in order to achieve products that meet the highest safety standards.

I feel that International Women in Engineering Day is important as any article on women in engineering is helping our cause. When I was as a child in kindergarten, I had posters of aircraft hanging over my bed, so naturally, my studies led me to work in the aerospace world. Personally, I had very few role models in my early career and therefore I now really enjoy meeting so many women in engineering especially at Rolls-Royce. You can really see the effort that Rolls-Royce is putting into encouraging women in engineering, and it is really helping us all.