Building a Car from Scratch and innovating for the future with Katie Kilroy, Formula Trinity

In todays podcast Melanie Boylan meets Katie Kilroy, a third year Mechanical Engineering student at Trinity College Dublin. She's the Head of Marketing of Formula Trinity; a chassis engineer for the internal combustion team as well as researcher for the control engineering department for the autonomous team. She's always up for new challenges and the chance to learn something new and it’s probably why She's on three departments. In her spare time Katie is developing android apps for people with dementia and volunteering tutoring secondary school students as a Committee member of Volunteer Tuition Program in Trinity.

Katie joined the team three years ago, as a chassis engineer. The chassis is like the skeleton of the car and she was in charge of designing the tabs which are used to attach all the components to the chassis. This involved communicating and collaborating with multiple departments and teams which has helped her get where she is in Formula Trinity. This year, she's heavily involved with the CAD (Computer Aided Design) and FEA (Finite Element Analysis) of the chassis structure and she is in charge of testing the front impact attenuator. She was asked to join the Business and Operations team to help out with social media. Five months later she is now the Head of Marketing having run a successful “Femuary” campaign to promote women in motorsports alongside two of our other members; Katherine Hardgrave and Sabrina Steinberga. With another upcoming social media campaign “Ai-pril” headed by Katherine, with a talk on Women in Ai on April 7th. 

About Formula Trinity:  http://formulatrinity.com/

Formula Trinity is a student lead team made up of current Trinity College students, competing in the UK competition of Formula SAE. The Team Captain Arnie Sasnauskas founded the team in 2017 after his 1st year of engineering here at Trinity, with the help of the Head of Engineering David Simonian and Deputy Head of Engineering William Dunne. The aim of the competition is to design and build a car throughout the academic year, you then race it at the Formula Student UK competition at Silverstone in July. The team gives Trinity students the platform to put the theory they learn in lectures to practice and gain real life experience as a member of an engineering, business, or autonomous team. The team motto is “Building careers, one race car at a time”. Being on the team is voluntary, they all put hours of work in during spare time to ensure they complete the car and rely on generosity from sponsors to fund the construction of the car.

Since 2017, they have grown to over 80 members and have become the top performing team in Ireland, achieving 2nd place in the 2019 Class 2 in the Formula Student UK competition. They have accomplished this through bringing together talented students from first years to masters and multiple disciplines such as engineering, computer science, business, law and many others. They are a team of equal opportunity constantly promoting gender equality and women in STEM.

The team made up of three main sections: Internal Combustion, Autonomous and Business & Operations, with each having broken down into departments. The internal combustion section has 7 departments ranging from aerodynamics and powertrain to suspension and electronics. The Autonomous section has 4 departments which include control engineering, path-planning, perception, state- estimation and reinforcement learning.