CEA - Building a Sustainable Future with Hannah Copeman

Today’s episode is a really special one because it not only emphasizes the importance of having higher percentages of women in engineering classes and in the industry as a whole, but it also brings up the discussion of how civil engineering of the future may look like from sustainability and even space exploration (hello, Mars!) standpoint. 

Today’s guest is Hannah Copeman, an amazing female engineer to join the ever-growing group of women in engineering, who got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Toronto, Canada, emphasizing on Structural Engineering. She talks about how she got into engineering in the first place, and why she decided to pursue her higher education in a different country. She also dives deeper into the aspects of being a female engineering student and how this played out during her undergraduate and graduate studies, as well as some personal obstacles she had to overcome, especially in the first two years of her undergrad.

Hannah is currently working for an organization, called One Community, that focuses on building sustainable cities, specifically tackling the infrastructure industry, which accounts for more than 70% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. She’s in the civil structural team, so she oversees and helps design the lancet-arch-shaped, self-sufficient residence built out of aircrete. 

Hannah is now in the process of studying for her FE exam, and she shares some tips and habits she has used in order to keep herself motivated and productive that may help literally any undergrad, grad, or young engineer out there. Nevertheless, she dives a bit into how the current space exploration and the development in the industry may allow civil engineers to work on projects to be built on Mars, using totally different technologies and techniques, but also taking advantage of some peculiarities of the once thought “uninhabitable” environment. 

This is a fun and interesting conversation to listen to, which will certainly add a lot of value. It will allow you to get a lot of insights about the future of the field from a young and visionary engineer’s perspective, both when it comes to the necessity of becoming sustainable due to global warming and to the ground-breaking discoveries in planetary surface construction.

Resources Mentioned (some links are affiliate links)

Hannah Copeman’s LinkedIn Profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-copeman

University of Toronto, Canadá - https://www.utoronto.ca

Manhattan College  -https://manhattan.edu

Thornton Tomasetti - https://www.thorntontomasetti.com

One Community - https://www.onecommunityglobal.org

Who Moved My Cheese, by Spencer Jhonson - Here

Bjarke Ingels Group - https://big.dk/#projects

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