Keith Pilkey, Professor and Head of the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at Queen’s, has been named a Champion of EDI by Engineers Canada. The professional organization polled its “30 by 30 Champions” network and subsequently deemed 13 individuals EDI Champions.
According to the website, the criteria was:
Individual leaders in engineering workplaces who use their platforms to further women and gender diverse people’s presence in the engineering profession.
With the designation, Engineers Canada posted the following list of achievements attributed to Pilkey.
Since his appointment as department head in 2018, Dr. Pilkey has made equity, diversity, inclusion and Indigeneity (EDII) a priority. He established a Women in MME working group and an EDII committee in his department, and he serves as the member-at-large in the Circle of Advisors for the Indigenous Futures in Engineering program at Queen’s (formerly called Aboriginal Access to Engineering). Dr. Pilkey was also part of a small group who developed the mandate and secured an endowed donation for the new Chair for Women in Engineering at Queen’s. Dr. Pilkey’s research interests lie in the areas of material deformation and failure mechanisms as they relate to a wide variety of engineering materials and applications, ranging from steel and aluminum alloy sheet used for the manufacture of automotive structural components to cancellous bone and the decrease in fracture strength caused by bone-degenerative diseases such as osteoporosis. He teaches undergraduate courses in materials science, solid mechanics, and deformation processing, and courses in metal forming and materials selection in design at the graduate level.
The EDI Champions were acknowledged and celebrated at the Engineers Canada 30 by 30 Conference which took place virtually April 13, 20, and 27, 2022.
