Inventive Podcast

Roma Agrawal

In the second episode of Inventive Podcast, Trevor meets award-winning structural engineer Roma Agrawal MBE – Mega Badass Engineer – that’s what Roma says! She designed the foundations of London’s iconic skyscraper The Shard and everything from train stations to footbridges. Roma’s book Built uncovers the stories behind iconic structures and her children’s book How Was That Built?: The Stories Behind Awesome Structures is available from September 2021. Roma’s love of concrete influenced writer CM Taylor‘s story The Nightbuilder featuring a Banksy-like character and amazing concrete structures that appear in the middle of the night.

Inventive Podcast Episode One

Shrouk El-Attar

In the first episode of the brand-new Inventive Podcast series, Professor Trevor Cox meets Electronics Engineer Shrouk El-Attar, refugee and campaigner for LGBT rights, recently awarded the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) Prize for her work in femtech, smart tech that improves the lives of cis women and trans men, at the Institution of Engineering and Technology Young Woman Engineer of the Year Awards 2021. We commissioned a piece by award-winning writer and poet Tania Hershman based on Shrouk’s inspirational interview. Tania’s hybrid work Human Being As Circuit Board, Human Being as Dictionary combines fiction, poetry and non-fiction. There is beautiful and poetic imagery, “human being as circuit board”, and exploration of language, “human being as dictionary”.