Professor Jane Grimson

Chartered and Euro Engineer

Research Engineer

 

The former President of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland (IEI) is Prof. Jane Grimson. She was the first woman to be elected IEI President in its 165-year history. She follows her father, William Wright, into the position. He was President in the late 1970s.

Jane is Dean of Engineering and Systems Sciences at Trinity College Dublin and she is also Associate Professor and Co-Chair for Health Informatics at the College.

Prof. Grimson attributes much of her interest in engineering to her father.

"He regularly brought me with him to his workplace. At the time he was doing research on a large-scale model of Southampton Water and that provided lots of opportunities for fun!"

Later she attended Alexandra School, whose ethos was that no career was off-limits for women. Jane studied Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry at Honours level.

"The fun and excitement of engineering passed on to me by my father and the strong belief Alexandra generated that anybody can follow the career they choose, irrespective of sex, provided me with two of my projects for my Presidency. The slightly wackier one is to have a Bring your Daughter (or niece or grand-daughter) to Work Day! Let them see what engineers do."

"The second project is an Engineering Day when we will let young people, their teachers and their parents get to know engineering, see the excitement, see the huge variety of work engineers do – building computers, designing software, biomedics, genetics, bridges, roads, improving the environment – the list goes on."

"Ireland must continue to produce a stream of highly qualified engineers in every discipline. Government has a big responsibility in this regard, particularly in ensuring that there are sufficient trained teachers and sufficient equipment to allow young children develop an interest in scientific subjects."

Prof. Grimson was the first female graduate in Engineering from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1970. She did an MSc in Computer Science at the University of Toronto before returning to Scotland, the land of her birth, to do a PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

Apart from her normal lecturing duties, Jane is heavily involved in research, particularly in databases and health informatics. She says that the next decade will see major changes in the way healthcare is delivered, for example by booking appointments with consultants at hospitals via the Internet. Research is playing a vital role in preparing us for these changes, and Prof. Grimson feels that an increasing amount of national endeavour, by Government, educational establishments and industry must be devoted to generating opportunities for investment in research and development.

Prof. Grimson acts as consultant to a number of commercial, industrial and semi-state bodies and is an evaluator of various EU and national research programmes. She is a member of the visiting panel at the EU Research Centre at Ispra in Italy. She is Technical Manager of TCD teams in a variety of externally funded projects under COST 11-bis, MAP, DELTA, STAR, Esprit, AIM , RACE, ACTS and Telematics programmes of the EC, industry and under the National Strategic Research Programme. She is currently Project Manager of the SYNAPSES Project involving 26 institutions from 14 different countries, funded under the Health Telematics Programme.