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 |
| Known for |
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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 famous projects like the Shard skyscraper. Roma is also a writer and works 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. She became interested in engineering during a summer job at the Oxford Physics Department. There, she worked with engineers who were designing parts for particle detectors at CERN.
Amazing Engineering Projects
In 2005, Roma joined a company called Parsons Brinckerhoff. She became a certified engineer in 2011. For six years, she worked on the Shard, which is one of the tallest buildings in Western Europe. She helped design its strong foundations and its unique pointy top, called a spire.
Roma calls working on the Shard a highlight of her career. She said, "Projects like that only come once or twice in your career." The Shard is about 310 meters (1,016 feet) tall. Building it required a special "top-down" method, which was new for such a huge building. The spire was built in pieces off-site. This made it quicker and safer to put together high up in central London.
Besides the Shard, Roma also worked on Crystal Palace Station and a footbridge at Northumbria University. She worked for WSP for ten years. Then, in 2015, she joined Interserve. In 2017, she became an associate director at AECOM.
In 2018, Roma Agrawal was given a special award called the Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). 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 has won many awards for her engineering work:
- 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
Inspiring Others
After working on The Shard, Roma started giving talks about her work to students. She discovered she loved teaching people about engineering. She has now spoken to over 15,000 people around the world.
Many news outlets have featured Roma's career. She helped start the Your Life Campaign. This campaign aimed to change how school children view science and engineering.
In 2014, she was part of Marks and Spencer's "Leading Ladies" campaign. She was 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. 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 appears as an expert on Mysteries of the Abandoned. She helped judge the trophy design competition for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2015 and 2017.
Roma wrote a book called Built: the Hidden Stories Behind our Structures. It explains structural engineering in an easy-to-understand way. A magazine called IET E&T said her book was "a treatise on structural engineering." They also said, "Roma Agrawal has a knack for taking complex concepts, stripping them down and reducing them to their most basic form... What makes 'Built' so enjoyable is the way Agrawal applies her enquiring mind... to an engineering world that she finds simultaneously invisible while being no less than fundamental to modern society."
Championing Diversity
In 2013, Management Today magazine named Roma one of their "Top 35 Women Under 35." She uses social media, podcasts, and interviews to raise awareness about diversity in engineering. In 2016, she was a main speaker at the IET's Young Women Engineer of the Year award. In 2017, the Women's Engineering Society listed her as one of the "Inspiring Women in Engineering."
See also
In Spanish: Roma Agrawal para niños
