Kate Simonen Named Honorary Fellow of IStructE
The Institution is delighted to award Honorary Fellowship Awards to the UW’s Kate Simonen, along with Neil Gibbins, Peter Wilkinson, and Peter Oborn.
The Honorary Fellowship is awarded to senior non-structural engineering figures who share similar values to the Institution and whose activities and interests bring added value to the Institution and its work.
Honorary Fellows through their work will additionally bring visibility to the profession of structural engineering. In recent years Honorary Fellows have included Angela Brady (Past President RIBA).
There is currently a very strong Institution focus in two fields of activity:
- Climate action where the Institution has placed a response to the climate emergency on a par with its traditional focus on structural safety.
- Fire Safety and the reinvention of CROSS to include fire reporting as part of the response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy.
In both arenas, we believe the Institution’s mission will be strengthened by appointing several new Honorary Fellows and therefore the following individuals have received Honorary Fellowship of IStructE:
Kate Simonen AIA SE
Kate is Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, and the Executive Director of the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF). She has been instrumental in shifting the dial on sustainability in the USA.
Connecting significant professional experience in high performance building design and technical expertise in environmental life cycle assessment, Kate works to spur collective action to bring net embodied carbon to zero. She does this through cutting-edge research, cross-sector collaboration, and the incubation of new approaches.
Kate directs the research of the Carbon Leadership Forum and convenes collaborative initiatives such as the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (the EC3 tool) and the Structural Engineers 2050 Challenge that was subsequently adopted by the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) of the USA.
The Institution of Structural Engineers is a professional body for structural engineering based in the United Kingdom, with 27,000 members operating in over 100 countries. The Institution uphold standards, shares knowledge, promotes structural engineering and provides a voice for the structural engineering profession.
The Institution is an internationally recognised source of expertise and information concerning all issues that involve structural engineering and public safety within the built environment
The Institution provides professional accreditation for structural engineers and publishes a monthly magazine, The Structural Engineer.
