Finalists for this year's Rising Star award have been announced.
Kate Francis – Civil Engineer, Hyder Consulting
Kate Francis is a Civil Engineer who graduated with First Class Honours from the Queensland University of Technology in 2012. She has a double major in Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering.
Since graduating, Francis has been employed at Hyder Consulting. Francis has worked in both the Urban Development and Transport teams. She has experience in all facets of civil design, contract administration, preparation of cost estimates and independent verification. Kate also has experience in business development through the pursuits of major projects, bidding / tendering and legal training.
As her career progresses, Francis’ responsibilities have increased and she has acted as the lead civil engineer and project leader on several developments. She is experienced in managing resources and time to deliver quality results to clients. Some of her career achievements to date include:
- Project managing the Civil Works and Development Application Process for an Inner – City Highrise development. This included significant stakeholder engagement with all other consultants, contractors, architects and government agencies.
- Managing the civil design and construction phase for a Brisbane subdivision
- Writing a winning tender for the QLD Transport team to provide engineering services to a regional council.
Kate Macfarlane – Product Manager, BOC Limited
Since joining BOC more than four years ago, Kate Macfarlane has consistently achieved excellent results and helped develop strategies to grow BOC’s bulk business and delight its customers.
For the past three years, Macfarlane has been working in the Ethylene product management team. She has been a key player behind expanding the supply chain of Ethylene (used in the growing Liquified Natural Gas production process) in Australia for BOC South Pacific. She has demonstrated leadership in safety, lifted the quality of internal processes, nurtured and grown stakeholder relationships within BOC and with suppliers and lead the day‐ to‐day customer relationship interface with great success.
She was assigned to develop a centralised repository for staff members to easily find up‐to‐date processes, regulation and training requirements for the handling of ethylene – a constantly evolving area. The repository along with the process she developed to ensure it was kept up to date benefited both BOC and customers. The BOC ethylene supply chain now use this repository for ensuring the safe supply, transport and handling of ethylene ‐ giving BOC a competitive advantage in the market.
Her contributions and work have not gone unnoticed, recently she was selected to take‐part in a round‐table forum with Linde BOC’s global CEO, which only a select few Australian employees participated in.
Sally Mayberry – Environmental Advisor, Origin Energy
Origin Energy is a vertically integrated Oil and Gas company currently operating as the principal contractor for the Australia Pacific LNG Coal Seam Gas (CSG) project.
Sally Mayberry’s role determines environmental risks, deciphers legislative requirements and works towards implementing on-ground solutions.
A business critical supply chain issue occurred early 2014 and Mayberry was called upon by Origin’s field operators to coordinate the urgent sampling of 14,000 soil and drilling mud samples. All drilling rigs were stood down in response to the HSE risk at significant monetary and scheduling cost. At this point Mayberry’s role was critical to the success of the taking this action. Using her environmental knowledge and relationships with internal and external stakeholders and service providers, she was able to coordinate a response team of specialists to over 190 different sampling locations.
Every soil analysis laboratory in Australia was dedicated to analysing the samples as a matter of urgent priority under Mayberry’s supervision.
The eventual compliance outcome of the event was that waste transport was identified as a significant risk to the business. Subsequently, Mayberry developed practical tools to enable stakeholders to make sound decisions, and ensure legal requirements were adhered to in the field.
The solution came in the form of an electronic waste transport application that is in development in conjunction with Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection and will be utilised industry-wide for waste tracking.
Rachel Hogan – ABB Graduate Program, ABB Australia
Rachel Hogan joined ABB’s Power Conversion business unit during her first 6-month rotation within ABB Australia’s Graduate Engineering Program.
Hogan has contributed to ABB’s power Conversion business unit in many ways. She utilised her engineering expertise to set up the technical parameters of a substantial solar inverter installation at the site of a large global manufacturing organisation. Additional tasks undertaken by Hogan included: supporting the integration activities of an acquired company, solar marketing communications activities, an analysis of zero tariff metering, as well as conducting an electric vehicle market study for the Australian market.
As well as this, Hogan has been an active member of Engineers Without Borders since 2010. She was in charge of identifying, scoping and developing new engineering projects, and also acted as the official spokesperson for the EWB ACT region when communicating with local partners.
Hogan also led a team of ten engineering students to design and build activities introducing key humanitarian engineering principles to both adults and children. Her flagship EWB
workshop introduced the principles of renewable energy by using a cycle-in cinema, which her team designed and built.
The activity was subsequently deployed in Sydney as part of the New Year’s Eve festivities in 2013, which EWB was the official charity partner for.