How SaRS is helping me inspire engineers to go with their gut and blossom!

The Safety and Reliability Society (SaRS) has been a huge influence on my professional progress since I joined it in 2016. At that point, it provided me with a rare connection to experts from the field of systems safety, including future WSP colleagues (among them SaRS Fellows Steve Denniss and Ross Dunsford, and SaRS Chair Peter Sheppard). As a research lead at Imperial College London, I found that their real-world industry perspective complemented my own academic experience – without it I probably wouldn’t have made the jump from academia to industry.

Modest in size but dynamic in its thinking, SaRS has rightly earned an international reputation for setting new standards in safety and reliability. That is why I have invested so much time into it over the years - from organising and speaking at London branch events and its National Council, to leading its Early Career & Outreach Committee and guest editing its renowned journal on Systems Engineering and Safety SaRS has helped me to become a more well-rounded engineer and, more excitingly, it has helped me to help others do the same!

Becoming its youngest ever Fellow was not only a huge source of pride for me, but has given me a platform to reach out and inspire other early career engineers and researchers. I want to lead by example and encourage these people to listen to their gut, to not be afraid to challenge the status quo and actively scrutinise received wisdom and common practice. For me this is where true progress can be made. And there is a lot at stake in getting this message across, particularly in safety critical industries like rail, and particularly for the UK - home to the oldest railway in the world!

Readers are probably all too aware of the constantly shifting landscape that we must navigate with regards to an evolving approach to safety and reliability in rail. This is where the seminars and conferences organised by SaRS add enormous value – ultimately helping us save lives by promoting the latest developments from leading professionals and researchers to stimulate debate.

That said, SaRS can do more. We need to look beyond the UK, beyond rail and beyond engineering to make a bigger difference. We need to listen to universities as research partners and, in turn, industry needs to reciprocate this support, perhaps by funding applied research to resolve known problems.

We also need to look beyond technology. As immersive and fascinating as automation and digitalisation are, our focus on technology can be at the expense of understanding how people interact with it. We are, after all, all playing a critical part in the complex socio-technical and cyber-physical systems we engineer and operate within. In the same way that SaRS helped me bridge the gap between industry and academia, shouldn’t we, as engineers, engage with sociologists, ergonomists and other such professionals to better design and build eco-systems where people and societies live safely and thrive?

I might be biased, but I think that SaRS is more relevant in 2020 than it’s ever been; its recent and upcoming seminars attest to that, diving into subjects such as driverless cars; automatic train operation; cyber security; Artificial Intelligence; medical advances; and even space technology! If you want to find out more, please contact me and visit the SaRS website here.

Dr Mikela Chatzimichailidou MEng MSc FSaRS CEng MIET