Yewande Akinola
Yewande Akinola is a Chartered Engineer with a passion for creativity and innovation. Yewande Akinola has delivered projects in the United Kingdom, the Middle East, East Asia and Africa. For her significant contributions, she was awarded an MBE in the queen’s 2020 New Year Honour’s list for services to Engineering Innovation and Diversity in STEM. She is an expert in the design of sustainable systems manufacturing for assembly, innovation, and innovation management.
Yewande Akinola’s interests include developing water and sanitation for underdeveloped countries and manufacture of buildings and systems in the built environment (buildings and bridges).
Yewande holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Engineering Design and Appropriate Technology from the University of Warwick and a Master of Science degree in Innovation and Design for Sustainability from Cranfield University. She is also a certified Innovation Leader from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has worked as Design Engineer for Arup; a Principal Engineer at Laing O’Rourke and she is currently Ambassador for Clean Growth and Infrastructure at Innovate UK.
In 2010, she presented Titanic: The Mission for Channel 4 and National Geographic Society and has appeared on BBC Radio 4. Moving to 2012, she judged Queen Elizabeth Create the Trophy Prize for Engineering competition. In the same year, she was also shortlisted and won the IET Young Woman Engineer of the Year Award. In 2014, she designed a Rainwater Harvesting System, having previously designed model-sized houses as a child.
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Yewande is a prominent voice in the Women’s Engineering Society, a movement to enable inclusion and diversity in engineering. She has previously worked for Girl Guiding UK to encourage more young women into engineering and featured in a Royal Academy of Engineering campaign – Designed to Inspire. She was featured on the QEPrize 2014 campaign “Create the Future” and delivered a keynote speech at the 2016 Ada Lovelace day celebration. Yewande is featured in the Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017 campaign “Portrait of an Engineer”. She is the founder of the Global Emit Project which focuses on mentoring people who are interested in engineering.
Yewande sits on the Board of Trustees of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the council at the University of Warwick. She is on the Royal Academy of Engineering Africa CATALYST Steering Committee and a Visiting Professor at the University of Westminster.
Yewande is a recipient of several awards: the UK Society of Public Health Engineer’s Young Engineer of the Year Award, the UK Young Woman Engineer of the Year, the Exceptional Achiever Award by the Association for Black Engineers (AFBE-UK) and the Association of Consultancy and Engineering, UK (ACE). Yewande Akinola has also been named one of the UK’s Top 35 Women by Management Today and was awarded Outstanding Woman in STEM. In 2019, she was also named one of the UK and Europe Top Influential Women in Engineering by Financial Times and Inclusive Boards. Yewande Akinola’s engineering journey continues to centre around creativity and creating a better world. For more information on Yewande’s inspiring works, please visit www.yewandeakinola.co.uk