Dawn Bonfield was President at WES between 2014 and 2015 after first becoming a Council member in 2011. She Image removed.worked for WES in a voluntary capacity in the Stevenage office until her Presidency came to an end in 2015 when she took on the role of Chief Executive Officer for one year, the first that WES has employed as CEO since the days of Caroline Haslett in the 1940s. Dawn is now a Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor of Inclusive Engineering at Aston University, and Founder & Director of Towards Vision, a Company which aims to work towards a vision of diversity and inclusion in engineering.
She is a materials engineer by profession having studied Materials Science at Bath University, and has worked as a materials engineer at AERE Harwell, Citroen Research Centre (Paris), British Aerospace (Bristol), MBDA (Stevenage), and the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (London

Whilst at WES Dawn was the Founder of National Women in Engineering Day (NWED) (now International Women in Engineering Day – INWED) in 2014, and in 2015 won a WISE Award and an Association Congress Award for this campaign. In February 2016 she won the SEMTA award for Diversity in Engineering, was a finalist of the 2016 GEDC Airbus Global Diversity Award, and in 2017 won the Women’s Business Council ‘Starting Out in STEM’ award.

In addition to her work on NWED whilst at WES, Dawn was also the instigator of the inaugural 50 Women in Engineering List with the Daily Telegraph in 2016, the Magnificent Women schools outreach project, and the Sparxx project to support students in STEM.

Dawn now works on a number of projects and outreach activities relating to diversity and inclusion in engineering, and further details can be found on her website here www.dawnbonfield.com.

In 2016 she received an MBE for ‘Services to the promotion of diversity in engineering’.