Lottie’s annual visit to IMPACT

November 6, 2020

This week Lottie joined IMPACT as part of Tomorrow’s Engineers Week.

Every year the Women’s Engineering Society Young Members’ Board (YMB) organises a ‘Lottie Tour’ as a way to capture the interest of a younger engineering audience by showing current engineers giving Lottie Dolls a tour of their workplace – and show how varied and exciting it is to work in engineering!

Lottie was delighted to hear about all the developments at IMPACT in recent months – it certainly seems a long time ago since Lottie was in her hard hat and pitching in during the construction phase of the IMPACT building!

During her second visit last year, Lottie was able to see the completed building with only the finishing touches go.  Lottie visited the building and explored the facilities, including:

*  1,600m2 open plan workshop

* 80 single occupancy offices

* Hub space for over 150 researchers

* Colocation space for 50 industrial and academic collaborators

This year was a little different.

To start her ‘tour’, Lottie enjoyed a video call with IMPACT Operations Manager, Dr Anke Heuberger.  Dr Heuberger and Lottie first met in 2018 when the building was mid-way through construction.  During their catch up, Lottie learned a lot about current research activity – such as how IMPACT supported a community project to make #FrontLineFaceShields for the NHS during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new environmentally friendly water treatment method and watching fascinating footage of liquid behaving like a solid!

The latter featured in this year’s Swansea Science Festival so Lottie took the opportunity to watch the how-to-guide and discovered a unique method for changing how fluid behaves – using an experiment that she could easily recreate at home!

It was then onto a virtual tour to discover how the building had progressed further since her last visit.

Lottie learned all about the the big launch event in February with Rt Hon Mark Drakeford AM, First Minister of Wales and watched a video of him discussing IMPACT as ‘somewhere where the future of manufacturing of Wales is being created’!

Lottie then learned about the work of Dr Grazia Todeschini and how her love for science and electrical engineering brought her to travel to many places, starting from a small village in Northern Italy to Milan, to the Unites States and finally to Swansea.  It was then onto a new project looking to develop and commercialise advanced and sustainable energy storage systems with Professor Serena Margadonna.

After an exciting tour with IMPACT, Lottie downed tools and enjoyed a well earned break – ready for another day as the Super Lottie she is!

 

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