Roma Agrawal facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Roma Agrawal
MBE FICE
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Roma Agrawal at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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Mumbai, India
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| Alma mater | University of Oxford Imperial College London |
| Occupation | Structural Engineer |
| Employer | AECOM |
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Roma Agrawal is a talented engineer from India and Britain. She lives in London and designs amazing buildings and structures. She helped build some really big projects, like the Shard skyscraper. Roma is also an author and works hard to encourage more girls and women to become engineers.
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Early Life and Education
Roma Agrawal was born in 1983 in Mumbai, India. Later, she moved to London. She also lived in Ithaca, New York for five years. She finished her high school studies at North London Collegiate School. In 2004, she earned a degree in physics from the University of Oxford. Then, in 2005, she got a master's degree in structural engineering from Imperial College London.
Roma says her love for building things (and sometimes taking them apart!) started when she played with Lego as a child. This helped her become excited about engineering. She also got interested in engineering during a summer job at Oxford University. There, she worked with engineers who were designing special equipment called particle detectors for CERN. These detectors help scientists study tiny particles.
What Does a Structural Engineer Do?
In 2005, Roma Agrawal started working at Parsons Brinckerhoff. This company later became WSP. She became a fully qualified engineer in 2011. For six years, she worked on the Shard, which is the tallest building in Western Europe. She helped design its strong foundations and its unique pointy top, called a spire. Roma says working on the Shard was a highlight of her career. She felt very lucky to be part of such a huge project.
The Shard is about 1,016 feet (309.6 meters) tall. Building it was a big challenge. They used a special method called "top-down construction." This means they built the basement levels at the same time as the floors above ground. This had never been done before on such a tall building. The spire at the top was built in sections, like giant Lego pieces. These sections were put together and tested in a factory. This made it quicker and safer to assemble them high up in central London.
Besides the Shard, Roma also worked on Crystal Palace railway station and a footbridge at Northumbria University. She worked at WSP for ten years. Then, in 2015, she joined Interserve as a Design Manager. In 2017, Roma became an associate director at AECOM.
In 2018, Roma Agrawal received a special honor called the Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). This award recognizes her important work. She also became a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 2018. In 2021, she was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Awards and Recognition
Roma Agrawal has won many awards for her engineering work and for inspiring others:
- 2011: Young Structural Engineer of the Year from the Institution of Structural Engineers
- 2013: Best in Science & Engineering at BDO's British Indian Awards
- 2014: Engineer of the Year at the Women in Construction Awards
- 2015: Diamond Award for Engineering Excellence from the Association for Consultancy and Engineering
- 2017: Lewis Kent Award from the Institution of Structural Engineers
- 2017: Rooke Award for Public Promotion of Engineering from the Royal Academy of Engineering
- 2025: Honorary Doctorate from The University of York
Sharing Her Knowledge
After working on The Shard, Roma found she loved talking about engineering. She often spoke to children at schools and students at universities. She wanted to help more people understand what engineers do. Since then, she has spoken to over 15,000 people around the world!
Many newspapers and websites have written about Roma's career. She was a founding member of the Your Life Campaign. This campaign aimed to change how school children see science and engineering. It was supported by the UK government.
In 2014, Roma was part of a campaign called Marks and Spencer's Leading Ladies. She appeared alongside famous people like Annie Lennox and Emma Thompson. Later that year, The Guardian newspaper named her one of six women engineers to follow on Twitter. She has given two TEDx talks. These are short, powerful speeches about ideas. She has also appeared on TV shows on BBC, Channel 4, and Science Channel. Since 2017, she has been a judge on the Channel 4 show Lego Masters. She also shares her engineering knowledge on Mysteries of the Abandoned. She helped judge the trophy design competition for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2015 and 2017.
Roma Agrawal wrote a book called Built: the Hidden Stories Behind our Structures. This book helps people learn about structural engineering. A magazine called IET E&T said her book is great because she can explain difficult ideas in a simple way. They said she helps people see how engineering is everywhere, even if it's often hidden.
Encouraging Diversity in Engineering
In 2013, Management Today magazine named Roma one of their Top 35 Women Under 35. She uses social media, podcasts, and interviews to talk about the importance of having different kinds of people in engineering. In 2016, she was a main speaker at an awards ceremony for young women engineers. In 2017, the Women's Engineering Society listed her as one of the "Inspiring Women in Engineering." She works hard to show that engineering is a great career for everyone.
See also
In Spanish: Roma Agrawal para niños
