Everyone had a great evening on 22 May 2018 as we held our annual Cranfield Manufacturing, Materials and Design Alumni awards, lecture and dinner. The event recognises the winners of The Distinguished Manufacturing Alumnus Award and The Excellence in Achievement Award for Recent Manufacturing Graduates and gives delegates a great opportunity to network and catch-up with fellow manufacturing alumni.
The winners of the Manufacturing Alumni Awards for 2018 were:
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 Distinguished Manufacturing Alumnus Award winner, Mahendra Patel, also gave this year's lecture on ‘Manufacturing – Pathway to creating wealth’.
Professor Rajkumar Roy, Director of Manufacturing at Cranfield University, said: “The Cranfield University Manufacturing Alumni Awards recognise special achievements and contributions of manufacturing alumni. Our winners thoroughly deserve this honour. Both award categories were keenly fought and we received some outstanding nominations.
Photos from the event:
This event formed part of the ninth annual National Manufacturing Debate ‘Will the published industrial strategy help rebuild manufacturing?’ hosted by Cranfield University.
About the awards:
- The Distinguished Manufacturing Alumnus/a Award - The Distinguished Manufacturing Alumnus/a Award is Cranfield Manufacturing’s highest honour and recognises those individuals who have achieved significant success within their industry and sector while upholding the highest standards in business practice.
- Excellence in Achievement Award for Recent Manufacturing Graduates - The Excellence in Achievement Award for Recent Manufacturing Graduates recognises those who have made significant progress in their careers within ten years of graduating/studying from Cranfield. This award recognises those who have the potential to reach the highest levels of business success in the future.
About the award winners
Mahendra Patel (MSc Industrial Engineering and Administration 1973), Chairman, Mamata Group
Mahendra is the founder of the Mamata Group based in Ahmedabad, India and is the Chairman and Managing Director of its 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 a recipient of the All India Export Excellence Award, Outstanding Manager of the Year Award and Progress Through Plastic Award.
Dr Alexandra Brintrup (PhD 2007), 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 policymakers, 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.