The Institution of Engineering Designers is very excited to announce that Mandy Chessell CBE FREng HonFIED has agreed to become President Elect, taking on the position of Honorary President at the AGM in July 2022.

Mandy is a computer scientist, a former Distinguished Engineer at IBM, and the first woman to be awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering. 

Mandy joined IBM in 1987, where her early work focused on distributed transaction processing, moving to work on event management, business process modelling and outside-in design (OID) before developing model-driven tools to simplify the analysis and design of large systems and then to automate their development. This work covers the development of user interfaces, services, information integration technology in the field of Master Data Management.

Her more recent work was focused on data lake architectures, metadata management and information governance.  She is the lead of the Egeria open source project that provides an open platform for metadata management, exchange and governance as well as being a founder of Pragmatic Data Research Ltd.

Mandy has collected many accolades during her career, including:

2001 – winner of the Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for the invention and engineering of Reusable Software Component Architecture.

2002 – elected a Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering.

2004 – winner of the British Computer Society nomination for the Women’s Engineering Society “Karen Burt” award. 

2006 – winner of the Female Inventor of the Year Award for building capacity for innovation and awarded a prize for the Best Woman in the Corporate Sector at the Blackberry Women in Technology awards.

2011 – Mandy became an Honorary Fellow of Institution of Engineering Designers

2012 – received ‘Innovator of the Year’ at the Cisco everywoman in Technology Awards.

2013 – received an Honorary Doctor of Science from Plymouth University.

2015 – received an Honorary Doctorate of Technology from University of Brighton and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the New Year honours for services to engineering.

2016 – named in the Top 50 Influential Women in Engineering List 2016 and received an Honorary Doctorate of Technology from University of South Wales.

2017 – received an Honorary Doctor of Science from University of Bath.

Mandy has a career-long interest in design and improving the human interface with information technology and the IED Trustees are delighted that she has accepted their invitation to become Honorary President.

Mandy commented: My association with the IED goes back to my election as an Honorary Fellow in 2011 and I’ve kept track of the developments of the Institution and their promotion of design ever since.  I’m really pleased to be able to work more closely with the Institution and look forward to my tenure as Honorary President.