The Gillian Skinner Award is presented to individuals who contribute nationally or within their local cluster, recognizing their efforts regardless of their career stage or type of involvement.

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This Year’s Winner

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Previous Winners

2023 Winner: Laura Luckhurt

Laura Luckhurst has been a beacon of constancy and excellence in leading the Women’s Engineering Society London Cluster. She has been exceptional in her quiet dedication to networking and delivering events. These have included a steady stream of high-quality webinars, panel events and lectures as well as in-person social events.

Laura has lived the WES values to the full, collaboratively sharing best practice and learning with other clusters, inclusively welcoming WES Members from within and out-with London equally, and empowering other volunteers to similarly deliver for WES.

The London Cluster events that Laura has shaped and delivered have been aligned to WES’ mission: supporting women at every stage of their career and shaping the engineering diversity debate in society through delivering topics from climate change to supporting minority groups gain equity in the engineering industry.

Laura has been relentlessly cheerful, approachable and inclusive, and even as she steps down, she continues to show unyielding commitment by sharing her experience with other volunteers. Laura is an outstanding role model for WES volunteers.

2022 Winner: Susan Robson

Susan Robson is a keen supporter of WES and currently serving as a Trustee. Susan has offered her expertise and guidance to the board and has been pivotal in creating and implementing an overall strategy for WES. Susan continues to support the development of the strategy and is always readily available to offer feedback to the Director Committee’s. This year Susan has also led the roll-out of a new board reporting template which has received great feedback from the wider membership. Susan has given much of her personal time to deliver these improved processes/reports and continues to be a key member within the organisation .

As well as being a board member Susan is also a key member of the Membership Directors Committee helping steer the membership offering of WES. She has also served as a Judge for the WE50 Awards, celebrating the top 50 Women in Engineering, as well as Head Judge for the Men as Allies Award. Susan is also a very keen supporter on Social Media and is always cheering other people’s success.

Susan’s skills, strategy expertise, attention to detail, and dedication to WES make her an excellent nominee for the Gillian Skinner award.

2021 Winner: Alexandra Knight

Alex Knight has made an outstanding contribution to WES over the last few years, initially as an active member of the London cluster and later, as a member of the WES Board.

In the latter role, Alex has shown great commitment through the work carried out as the Chair of the Partners Directors’ Committee where she built on the capabilities and abilities of the team, supported the staff member closely, and led several initiatives.

Alex has shown dedication and responsibility in her role despite the fact that during the time as a WES Trustee, she resigned from her job to venture as an entrepreneur within the STEM education sector, is the mother of two young children, and carries out many other activities including charity fundraising. Other WES volunteers see Alex as a role model and mentor, so she is a truly great example of what a WES volunteer is and represents within the WES community.

2020 Winner: Jennifer Glover

Jennifer was a founding member of the University Groups Board (UGB) in 2018, in which she was elected Chair.  During her year as Chair she worked closely with WES to form an identity for the Board and lay the foundations to enable the Board to serve its main purpose: supporting the network of WES student groups and providing a voice of students within WES. 

When Jennifer’s term as Chair finished, Jennifer took on the role of WES Student Liaison Officer which involves overseeing the work of the UGB, providing support and continuity as well as managing the WES Student Groups programme.  Her duties cover the application process, confirming the affiliation records of WES affiliated student groups on a yearly basis and responding to enquiries from potential student groups and students.  It must not be underestimated the amount of administrative work this involves, and Jennifer set about creating detailed spreadsheets to record her work and the initiative, for which the Membership and Volunteers Manager is particularly grateful.  Jennifer has also overhauled the webpages for the UGB and Student Groups, taking it upon herself to learn how to use features of the website and producing training documents for WES staff.

Jennifer was an active member of Council and continues to play a full role on the Members Directors’ Committee and Communications Directors’ Committee, and in particular providing a perspective from the students’ point of view.  Jennifer is also leading a group of members in the preparations for the relaunch of the ‘She’s an Engineer’ initiative, the group devised administrative processes to ensure it is GDPR compliant, efficient to administer and designed the webpages to ensure it is accessible and interesting to view.

Thank you, Jennifer, for your support of WES.  The input you made in the last two years has been phenomenal.