Wendy has since late 2022 moved on to another job, and we wish her the best of luck. 

Wendy has a first degree in Theoretical Physics and is a Fellow of both the Safety & Reliability Society (SaRS) and the Women’s Engineering Society (WES). She is also a Member of the International Council of Systems Engineers (INCOSE) and the Institute of Asset Management (IAM).  For over three decades, she has contributed to improving safety in the UK and internationally in a range of high-regulated sectors and has also long been actively involved in supporting the development of safety legislation, standards and guidance. She has also been a visiting lecturer at UCL in Engineering Safety Management.

Her career began in the nuclear sector working on PWR, SMR, AGR and RBMK. She subsequently gained extensive experience of safety and dependability cases in other safety-critical industries including defence, rail, aviation, autonomous vehicles and process (oil & gas / chem-pharma / biotech).  In recent years she has provided support to a wide range of rail projects in the UK, Australia, North America and the Middle East, COMAH sites in the UK & Ireland, and peer reviews for ITER (international nuclear fusion project). She has worked in a number of INSA and ISA roles.

She is currently a member of the IAM’s ‘hot topic’ Resilience Steering Group, having previously been involved with the development of Subject-Specific Guidelines (SSGs) for the IAM, including Reliability Engineering, Contingency Planning & Resilience, Systems Engineering and Fault & Incident Response. She also reviews papers for other organisations such as the Energy Institute, ORR, Law Commission, others, and conference submissions for INCOSE. She previously contributed to the UK railway sector’s guidance on engineering safety management and advised on the update of the COMAH Safety Regulations and CDOIF ERA.

Wendy’s current research project is on fusion plants, specifically addressing a “standards vacuum”, with the objective of developing a set of high-level design safety guidelines, also covering security and environmental protection. The new guidelines will help designers, safety case developers and regulators (and future operators and maintainers) better understand the goals that are appropriate for commercial fusion power plants.

She is also involved in developing opportunities for the NFI with industry partners and is a member of the faculty’s EDI Committee.