QV Career Talks - Engineering

A/Prof Kate Nguyen

RMIT University - Fire Safety Engineering

When you design a building, you surely don’t want it to catch fire. Unfortunately, many buildings cannot properly do this yet. Each year more than fifty Australians die because of residential fires. In addition, Australia generates an average of 20.5 million tonnes of landfill waste annually, and a third of that is from construction.

A/Prof Kate Nguyen develops non-burning cladding system and has also worked with Enviro-SIP Australasia, a cladding company, to significantly improve the availability and sustainability of materials that slow the burning of a fire. This is part of a response to the current cladding crisis in Australia that is estimated to cost $6.2B to fix structural and safety defects.

She then converts different types of waste into fire-safe building materials and works on new ways to reduce construction waste in landfill.

Dr Le Yu

University of Adelaide - Plant for Space

Dr Le Yu is currently postdoctoral research fellow at School of Chemical Engineering (CE), University of Adelaide. She received her BSc degree in Medical Science at University of Melbourne, and then received her one of MSc degrees in Food Microbiology at RMIT University. She completed her PhD focusing on fabrication of lightweight and non-lead 2D composite materials for high-performance radiation shielding applications. Her research interests include 2D nanomaterials, polymers, and nanocomposites for radiation shielding applications.

Le is currently a senior postdoctoral researcher in the field of renewable energy using low-carbon plasma technology to produce ammonia as an energy carrier and fertiliser. She also is lecturing Food Engineering for the School of Chemical Engineering.

Jennifer Del Mastro

Airservices Australia - Leading Assurance Specialist

Jennifer has 25+ years experience in Systems and Safety Engineering on complex projects in rail, defence and air traffic. Working predominantly in Defence, she had moved between the Land and Maritime domains. Her Systems Engineering experience gave her the experience to look into other designs and identify and assess the hazards and produce a safer product for personnel, hence moving into System Safety Engineering. She remained in Land and Maritime but in the last two years has moved into Air Traffic Management and Airspace Change.

Corey Briffa 

BMD - Construction Project Manager

Bio to come

S. Fisher

Poly Pacific - Chemical Engineer

Bio to come

Sebastian Aurisano

John Holland - Systems Engineer

Sabastian Aurisano is a systems engineer. He holds a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering (Honours) from Swinburne University. He has worked for John Holland since January 2019, having joined as a Graduate. In his time at John Holland, he worked on various projects and undertaken a range of roles, such as requirements management on the Metro Tunnel and briefly supporting Sustainability modeling and design management. He has also done cost estimating and construction planning on Level Crossing Removal Projects, assessment of road-rail vehicles and design work on rail vehicles.

His current role is Systems Engineer. He is a part of creating and managing a knowledge management system at John Holland, to better facilitate the sharing of knowledge and lessons across the business.

He also supports John Holland's innovation initiatives, such as leading a program of interviews with people responsible for some of John Holland's innovative highlights and supporting campaigns where people on projects suggest ideas and the best ones get implemented.

Jamali Kigotho

Aurecon - Mechanical Engineer

Bio to come

Daniel Grivicic

Rail Control Systems Australia - Senior Systems and Safety Engineer

Daniel is a risk engineer with an education in mechanical engineering and computing as well as a history in the electrical control systems industry. He has worked in systems safety since about 2006, moving from machinery safety to process safety and now with a more focused lifecycle approach since 2018, when he began working in rail.

In his work, Daniel considers the critical aspects of his company's railway signalling solutions through a broad systems safety lens. His approach is different in that he tries to bring a forward-looking approach to a rather conservative industry, with each new problem requiring mediation should a non-traditional solution be proposed. Systems Assurance is a new area that he has tackled since moving into railway signalling.

Mark Smith

Leidos Australia - Senior Software Integration Lead

Mark is a Senior Software Integration Lead for Leidos Australia. Mark has worked in a wide range of software development areas in Australia and the UK, from ecommerce websites to video billboards and data transformation for the Bureau of Meteorology. Mark spent the majority of his career working on embedded devices and IoT (before it was called that), working on product development or as a consultant for other companies such as Sony, Google, Microsoft as well as government organisations. Mark has been involved in creating video distribution solutions for homes, and also worked on VR Headsets and medical devices.

Sabastian Aurisano

John Holland - Knowledge Systems Engineer

Sabastian Aurisano is a systems engineer. He holds a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering (Honours) from Swinburne University. He has worked for John Holland since January 2019, having joined as a Graduate. In his time at John Holland, he worked on various projects and undertaken a range of roles, such as Requirements Management on the Metro Tunnel, cost estimating and construction planning on Level Crossing Removal Projects, assessment of road-rail vehicles and design work on rail vehicles.

His current role is Knowledge Systems Engineer. He is a part of creating a knowledge management system at John Holland, to better facilitate the sharing of knowledge and lessons across the business. He has hobbies outside of work: such as walking, boxing, playing video games and computer games and his proudest hobby: volunteering.

Anthony Simcox

Quantum Victoria - Teacher and Virtual Learning Manager

Bio to come

Dr Jiawen Li (biomedical and optical engineering)

University of Adelaide - Senior Lecturer at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Heart attack occurs when a blood vessel supplying the heart is suddenly blocked due to the rupture of a high-risk plaque. Despite significant advances in cardiology, the accurate diagnosis of high-risk plaques before they become life-threatening remains a challenge. Dr Jiawen Li is addressing this challenge by developing hair-sized 3D-printed imaging devices, providing images of blood vessels with high resolution and molecular insight that is not possible with existing technologies.

Jiawen regularly visits High schools, particularly disadvantaged schools, to inspire students to pursue STEM careers. She has also spoken about her research at Pint of Science and for mainstream media and podcast interviews. She also did presentations for the international society for optics and photonics on “the curious world of optics and photonics” and “Women in Optics’ planner” reaching more than 5000 students and researchers in over 25 countries.

Jiawen was awarded her PhD in 2015 at the University of California, Irvine (USA). She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Adelaide.

Dr Susie Nilsson (biomedical manufacturing)

Monash University - Adjunct Professor

Susie Nilsson received her PhD from Melbourne University before completing post-doctoral studies at the University of Massachusetts. On her return to Australia, Susie took up a position at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute where she became a laboratory head in 2002. In 2005 she moved to the Australian Stem Cell Centre prior to being appointed as an ARC Future Fellow and Laboratory Head at CSIRO in 2009. She became a group leader at ARMI, Monash University in 2013 and a CSIRO OCE Science Leader in 2014.

Currently she has an adjunct Professor appointment at Monash University. The specific goal of her laboratory is to understand hemopoiesis and therefore begin to address the changes and their effects in hemopoietic disease. She has focused much of her independent research career establishing models to identify where HSC reside in the BM, the cellular and extracellular components in that microenvironment as well as the mechanisms through which these regulate HSC fate. She is now heavily focused on how we can use these findings to improve human health, particularly in the areas of bone marrow transplant, stem cell mobilisation and haematopoietic disorders such as leukaemia and bone marrow failure.