SMEATON MEDAL WINNERS

2019 WINNER

Melanie Gines-Cooke

Melanie graduated in summer 2019 with a Masters with Distinction in Architectural Engineering, a fitting celebration rounding off a uniquely successful five years at Heriot Watt University.  Melanie’s success is not limited to curricular achievement: she has been prominent across the academic, social and sporting communities of the university, leading a student engineering team representing the UK in international competition; contributing weekly to the essential community-building activities of our multicultural university chaplaincy; selected as the only undergraduate student to speak at our first global AGM; and playing at home and abroad as vice-president of the university’s football club and captain of the 1st women’s team.

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As an engineer, Melanie brings this varied skillset to bear by excelling in tackling complex problems with ingenuity and good humour.  She instigated and led a mixed team of five students from a variety of engineering disciplines, ‘Skoon Maji’ (‘Clean Water’) in 2017, successfully steering this team through gruelling preliminary rounds and selection criteria in the Royal Academy of Engineering/National Academy of Engineering Global Grand Challenges Summit. Under her leadership, the team were selected from an original pool of >50 to represent the UK at the final of the Global Grand Challenges for Engineering Summit in Washington DC, where Melanie proved an excellent ambassador, both for the university and for UK engineering.  The team’s innovation was to propose a Solar-powered, logistically-integrated solution using ceramic and activated carbon to provide potable water to remote communities in Tanzania: a country Melanie had visited the previous year, and the experience of which, had a profound effect on her.

On return from the US, Melanie embarked on a related self-directed thesis project, looking at the thermal performance of indigenous building materials in domestic architecture in Nigeria, using sophisticated CAD simulation software to model the impact of design decisions on internal comfort conditions.  This excellent work was supported by IES (Integrated Environmental Systems) Ltd, a Scottish SME, who initially employed Melanie as an intern after competitive interview, and later retained her services in consultancy.

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Keen to further develop the themes arising from her thesis, Melanie took the initiative to develop a collaborative bid, and secured competitive funding from the ETP (Energy Technology Partnership) for a research project investigating the calibration of simulation models in thermal performance and energy use.  This successful £9,000 project was selected to be showcased at the ETP Annual conference and Melanie’s report was published by both ETP and IES on their respective websites: the work was of excellent, postgraduate-research-level quality.  She also presented her experience to the university’s inaugural AGM, to great acclaim.

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Melanie’s start to higher education was not so smooth.  In her first year at university, Melanie was diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a low vision condition that doesn’t allow her to see the blackboard in lectures, read normal size print, or recognise the faces of friends and colleagues at a distance.  Her determination to succeed, resourcefulness and her continued pursuit of excellence has ensured that the significant challenges of her visual disabilities have been rendered of secondary importance in a blossoming career. 

Melanie’s citation cannot be complete without recognising the work she has done in building and supporting the wider community at University.  As Vice-President of the Football Club, she has frequently represented the University, and her skills ensured she was selected by Santander for a sports scholarship in Barcelona in her final year.  Throughout her studies, Melanie has been a core part of the University Chaplaincy team: she lives on-campus, volunteering in providing weekly meals and activities for international students, and engaging with the wider student community across disciplines and stages of study, in interpersonal and community support.  She has been a valued Teaching Assistant in her final year, supporting younger engineering students in developing their studies.

It is these warm, human qualities, combined with academic excellence and rigour, and an international outlook that saw her - as an undergraduate - successfully tackle intractable Global Challenges on a world stage.  Her ability to synthesise real-world problems with her undoubted engineering skills, and her initiative in then engendering collaborations to drive these insights forward, is extraordinary and commendable.  Engineering is in need of people with her warmth, global outlook and creativity to meet the considerable challenges of the human condition in a modern world.