Our online Academy CAFÉ (Connecting Awardees, Fostering Engagement) series provides engagement for research awardees and alumni. The platform ensures you can still benefit from the expertise and experience within the Academy’s network, as well as allowing you to share ideas, challenges and best practice in the current period and beyond.
Inclusive leadership is a hugely important capability helping organisations adapt to diverse stakeholders, markets, ideas, and talent. Inclusive leaders adapt quickly to diverse scenarios and alternate perspectives with an open, non-judgmental mind to bring on the best results possible. Research shows that there are many benefits including better team performance, more collaborative working and better overall decision-making.
For this panel discussion, Professor Alicia El Haj FREng speaks to a panel of research awardees, Dr Min Zhang, Dr Brian Sheil, Professor Sophie Williams and Professor Alex Frangi, on the topic of inclusive leadership in academia, followed by an interactive Q&A session.
Professor Alex Frangi FREng
Professor Alex Frangi is Diamond Jubilee Chair in Computational Medicine held between School of Computing and School of Medicine at the University of Leeds. Alex leads CISTIB, where his international, interdisciplinary team performs cutting-edge research in biomedical imaging and modelling. Alex is Scientific Director of the Leeds Centre for HealthTech Innovation, Director of R&I for Leeds Institute for Data Analytics and holds a Chair in Emerging Technologies (2019 to 2029) from the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2021, Alex was awarded the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Technical Achievement Award for pioneering contributions in model and image-based computational modelling in medicine with clinical and innovation impact.
Dr Min Zhang
Dr Min Zhang leads the University of Strathclyde’s Applied Superconductivity Laboratory. Her research focuses on using advanced superconducting materials to achieve zero emissions in transportation and energy systems. Dr Zhang holds BEng and master’s degrees from Tsinghua University, China, and a PhD degree from the University of Cambridge. She became a Junior Research Fellow for Newnham College at Cambridge before moving to the University of Bath as a lecturer. Dr Zhang holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship in developing next-generation fully superconducting machines for electric aircraft. She is the vice editor-in-chief for IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity and a board member of the International HTS Modelling Workgroup. Dr Zhang is also the Associate Dean International for the Faculty of Engineering, focusing on international strategy and activities.
Dr Brian Sheil
Dr Brian Sheil studied a civil engineering undergraduate degree at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). His PhD was a collaboration between NUIG and the University of California, Berkeley, on the behaviour of pile group foundations. In 2014, Dr Sheil joined the University of Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher in experimental geotechnics focused on industry-funded research projects and was subsequently promoted to departmental lecturer in geotechnical engineering in January 2017. He took up his current position as a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at the University of Oxford in March 2018. He is also a Junior Research Fellow at St Catherine’s. In January 2021, Dr Sheil was also appointed to the position of Honorary Research Senior Lecturer at NUIG. He is the PI of the EPSRC-funded FOCUS project aiming to inject new science and technology into underground construction operations in collaboration with a range of industry partners.
Professor Sophie Williams
Professor Sophie Williams is a professor in medical engineering in the Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds. She leads research developing experimental methods to assess how orthopaedic interventions can be improved. Her approach is multidisciplinary and examples of projects she is involved in include assessing biological changes to tissues and surgical repair strategies, integrating sensors into hip replacements, and comparing orthopaedic devices retrieved form patients with those tested in vitro. Sophie currently holds a Royal Academy of Engineering/DePuy Research Chair in hip replacement technology, as well as an EPSRC Healthcare Technology Challenge Award.