ASME UK Section Held First In-Person Meeting

Founded in 2020, the ASME United Kingdom (UK) Section intends to revitalise ASME activities in the UK and beyond. Professor Erkan Oterkus, University of Strathclyde, was elected as the first Chair and now an AMSE Ambassador. The Section comprises academics, industrialists, and early-career researchers. After spending over three years with exclusively online activities during the pandemic, such as hosting both technical and informational webinars, the Section has held its first in-person meeting in central London in Nov 2023.

The meeting attendees included Jun Xia, chair of the present programme year (2023-24), Brunel University; Erkan Oterkus and Selda Oterkus, University of Strathclyde; Ali Albadri, London Underground Ltd.; and Sidi N’Dioubnan, professional section coordinator who came from Houston to attend the meeting. 

Attendees talked open-mindedly on a wide variety of proposals on future section activities, especially how to promote ASME activities and attract more interest from junior researchers to join the ASME in the UK, and how to connect with other sections in the European Union on collaborating activities. With great reaching-out efforts of Oterkus and Francesco D’Amore, Vice Chair of ASME UK affiliated with the University of Southampton, the Turkish and Spanish sections have made contacts with us for section collaborations. The Section is proud of Ali Albadri achieving ASME Fellowship status recently and celebrated his achievement. The section held its meeting in tandem with the MMM Hub Conference & User Meeting 2023 hosted by HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise). MMM Hub is a UK consortium on Materials and Molecular Modelling funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which comprises nine UK universities. About 60 academics and junior researchers attended the conference.

We have taken full advantage of the opportunity to advertise ASME, which attract considerable interests from the young researchers attending the conference in enquiring about ASME. N’Dioubnan engaged with the students, providing valuable insights about ASME, and further contributing to the event by organizing a table featuring ASME items for distribution. We are also proud to use the section funds to sponsor five junior researchers, who have just started their academic careers, for their registration fees of the conference.

The section believes in the promotion of in-person events because they are more efficient for section leaders to communicate and exchange ideas. Using top technical conferences as a medium to promote ASME and its activities is also a good strategy. Young research students and professionals will have a direct opportunity of knowing more about ASME. With interdisciplinary natures of present-day research and development, junior researchers working on other disciplines will have strong interest to communicate with ASME, which leads research on mechanical engineering.

In view of the success of the meeting, we plan to hold a similar in-person event within this programme year during the ASME Turbo Expo conference set for June 2024 in London. This is the largest technical conference in the topical area and expects over 2,000 attendees.

Reach out to ASME meeting attendees: Jun Xia, jun.xia@brunel.ac.uk; Erkan Oterkus, erkan.oterkus@strath.ac.uk; Selda Oterkus ,selda.oterkus@strath.ac.uk; Ali Albadri, alialbadri987@gmail.com; and Sidi N’Dioubnan, NDioubnanS@asme.org.