The Distinguished Manufacturing Alumnus Award 2018 is awarded to Mahendra Patel (MSc in Industrial Engineering and Administration 1973).
The Excellence in Achievement Award for Recent Manufacturing Graduates 2018 is awarded to Alexandra Brintrup (PhD 2007).
Our many congratulations go to them.
Come along to our annual Cranfield Manufacturing, Materials and Design Alumni Lecture and dinner on Tuesday 22 May 2018 to watch the presentations of the awards, and hear this year’s lecture given by our Distinguished Manufacturing Alumnus Award winner, Mahendra Patel, on ‘Manufacturing – Pathway to creating wealth’.
The lecture and awards will be followed by dinner, giving delegates a great opportunity to network and catch-up with fellow manufacturing alumni.
This event will be part of the ninth annual National Manufacturing Debate ‘Will the published industrial strategy help rebuild manufacturing?’ hosted by Cranfield University on 23 May. The day brings together manufacturing professionals from a range of sectors to discuss and debate current challenges in the industry.
More information on our award winners
Mahendra Patel
Chairman, Mamata Group
Mahendra is the founder of the Mamata Group based in Ahmedabad, India and is the Chairman and Managing Director of it’s flagship company, Mamata Machinery Private Ltd. Mamata is the pioneer in manufacturing bag making machines with indigenous developed technology and other packaging machinery. It exports more than 60% of its production worldwide. The Group is made up of several companies including Mamata Energy, producing renewable energy equipment.
Mahendra is known for his hands-on style and wide experience is setting up new Greenfield and engineering manufacturing industries. He is past president of the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry and former President of the Ahmedabad Management Association and works with several charitable organisations. He has been recipient of the All India Export Excellence Award, Outstanding Manager of the Year Award and Progress Through Plastic Award.
Mahendra obtained his MSc in Industrial Engineering and Administration in 1973.
Dr Alexandra Brintrup
Lecturer in Digital Manufacturing, University of Cambridge
Alexandra obtained her PhD from Cranfield University for her work in Genetic Algorithms in 2007. She then worked at the ABN AMRO Bank as a quantitative analyst, before joining the Distributed Information and Automation Lab (DIAL) in Cambridge for her postdoctoral studies in multi-agent systems in manufacturing and supply chains. She was later appointed as research fellow at the Complex Agent Based Dynamic Networks (CABDyN) research centre at the University of Oxford, where she studied supply chains from a complex networks perspective. Between (2012-2015) she was a University Lecturer at Cranfield University. She then re-joined the Institute for Manufacturing at Cambridge as a Lecturer is leading the Manufacturing Analytics Research within DIAL. Alexandra is a fellow of Darwin College.
Having trained as a manufacturing systems engineer and then embarking on a research career in Artificial Intelligence, she is fascinated by the merger of the two. Her research interests include:
• Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning, especially for predicting and handling emergence and uncertainty in Manufacturing
• Development of autonomous and scalable optimisation and distributed decision making technologies, particularly with nature-inspired algorithms and Multi-agent Systems
• Identification of emergent patterns in manufacturing and industrial systems, particularly in relation to robustness, resilience and quality outcomes
Over the past decade Alexandra has advised policy makers, served in a number of scientific committees, and worked with various industrial partners, including Boeing, Rolls Royce, Jaguar Land Rover, Suzuki and Procter and Gamble in these areas. She is a member of the All Party Parliamentary Groups in Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, EPSRC Early Career Forum in Manufacturing, the US based CASN-RA group, and IEEE.