Paul Hughes

Paul left Newcastle University in 2007 with a Masters Degree in Civil and Structural Engineering. As part of his course of study he spent a year at the National University of Singapore on a graduate exchange programme. He joined Royal Haskoning, Maritime Division, working from the design office on a wide variety of projects including ports, shipyards, dry docks, terminals and other maritime structures. During this time he was also seconded to BAM Nuttall, working on the London Olympic site overseeing the construction of bridges and retaining walls. In 2011, Paul joined 2H Offshore and over the next five years worked from London, Paris, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur on the design and management of specialist offshore projects. He expanded his engineering knowledge into subsea systems, specialising in the design, structural analysis and integrity management of riser and conductor systems. This included the design and construction of minimal facilities platforms and subsea structures for hybrid risers. Paul joined Hawkins in 2016 in order to further expand the civil engineering capability of the company.

Mike Hopwood

Mike’s civil and highway engineering career began at Parkman where he worked on several major projects, including the St Helens M62 link road and the A570 Ormskirk Bypass. Specialising in preliminary and detailed design work, Mike joined Giffords to work on the structural design of the Second River Dee Crossing. Mike moved to Cheshire County Council in 1994 and rose to the level of Principal Engineer. At the time, Cheshire was one of the largest UK local authorities and was also managing a large motorway network including the M6. During his progression, Mike led teams responsible for safety inspections, winter maintenance, streetworks and third party claims. Mike appeared in Court countless times as a witness for local government. Whilst with local government, Mike was responsible for the design, letting and construction of numerous large and complex civil engineering schemes. During this time, he gained particular expertise in all aspects of design, performance and specification of road building, drainage, construction materials and road and junction layouts including traffic management and road signs. Alongside his Engineering role, Mike was also a local government health and safety officer. He was responsible for workplace safety audits and risk assessments along with enforcement and the […]

John Holland

An Intel scholar, John graduated with a 1st Class Honours Degree in Mechanical Engineering from University College Dublin, Ireland in 2000. As part of his degree he developed an automatic moisture sensor for use in the peat industry for which he was awarded the Hewlett Packard national award for innovation in engineering. After a brief period with Schlumberger Oilfield Services in Peru, John returned to Ireland to take up a position with Teradyne Connection Systems, before joining Timoney Technology as a mechanical design engineer, where he specialised in the design and development of Hydropneumatic Suspension Systems for specialty off road vehicles. In this role he also gained considerable experience with computer aided engineering techniques such as Finite Element Analysis and Vehicle Multi-body Dynamic Analysis. John was appointed engineering manager with Timoney Technology and took over full technical responsibility for all engineering projects and products. Projects of note include the DARPA Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle, the USMC Gladiator Tactical Unmanned Vehicle and the Timoney ADT Independent Suspension Axle System manufactured under licence by Terex Equipment Ltd. John was also involved with the Ginaf Rally Power and DeRooy race teams for the 2007 Dakar Rally and has numerous automotive suspension patents filed […]

Richard Giles-Carlsson

Richard graduated from Imperial College London in 2012 with a first class degree in Civil Engineering. During his degree, Richard was sponsored by Laing O’Rourke on a number of projects, supervising the construction of steel frame and reinforced concrete structures, building foundations and retaining walls. Upon graduation Richard continued working with Laing O’Rourke at the Bond Street Station Upgrade project in London where he gained experience in pre-cast and in-situ reinforced concrete construction, underpinning of existing buildings, waterproofing and tunnelling. Richard was a Temporary Works Supervisor, responsible for supervising and inspecting numerous different schemes including scaffolding, excavation support systems and propping. Richard was also responsible for on-site assessment of health and safety measures and delivering safety briefings. In 2015, Richard continued his career with Laing O’Rourke at Davyhulme Wastewater Treatment project in Manchester planning and managing a range of activities including large excavations, piling and demolition works. Richard was also responsible for coordinating and supervising numerous subcontractors, in addition to reviewing and producing risk assessments, permits and work plans. Richard was an Appointed Person for confined space working and crane lifting operations and undertook reviews of safety incidents to establish the root cause. During the course of the project, Richard […]

Hannah Fletcher

Hannah graduated with a first class degree in Civil Engineering from Imperial College London in 2011. Upon graduation, Hannah joined Laing O’Rourke and worked on both infrastructure and commercial construction projects. She supervised construction works as a Site Engineer at Beckton Sewage Treatment Works Upgrade and then, as a Senior Engineer, planned and managed works on 3 projects: Crossrail- Tottenham Court Road Station, Wood Wharf (Canary Wharf) and Southbank Place. During this time Hannah gained experience in reinforced concrete construction: in-situ, pre-cast, basement raft slabs, jump forms and suspended slabs. She also gained experience in temporary works, lifting operations, excavations and installation of pressure pipelines. In 2016 Hannah moved to New Zealand to work for Fletcher Construction as a Project Manager. She led the delivery of a 40 storey commercial office tower, part of the Commercial Bay project in central Auckland, where she gained experience in steel structures, building envelopes (curtain wall façade and roof systems) and structural fire protection. Hannah joined Hawkins in 2020 and since joining has developed her skills to include the investigation of fires. She has since investigated fires in both domestic and commercial settings, as well as construction incidents, water ingress and storm damage. She is […]

Christabel Evans

Christabel graduated from Imperial College London with a 1st Class degree in Aerospace Materials. She carried out a summer internship at Rolls-Royce where she worked on the Joint Strike Fighter project investigating the presence of defects in linear friction welds. Following her Masters Degree, she continued her studies at Imperial College completing a PhD in the deformation mechanisms of zirconium alloys used in nuclear submarines. During this time, she was seconded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she worked alongside the Suresh Research Group. Her PhD involved the use of traditional materials characterisation techniques including Scanning Electron Microscopy, Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy, Transmission Electron Microscopy and X-ray Diffraction, as well as computational modelling. Having completed her PhD Christabel worked as a consultant for Efficio, London, where she specialised in procurement optimisation across a wide range of industries including civil service, engineering and defence. In 2013 Christabel relocated to Northern Ireland where she worked as a Materials Development Engineer at Schrader Electronics. She was responsible for the testing and characterisation of conceptual and current materials and her work involved failure analysis of electrical components including battery tag failures, characterisation of solder composition for PCB/battery failures and microscopy of PCBs to investigate […]

Jonathan Emm

Jonathan’s engineering career began at Morganite Thermal Ceramics. Here he ran projects to develop a non-destructive testing technique for their foundry ceramic products, as well as a new product with very high thermal shock resistance. Jonathan joined BAE SYSTEMS in 2000 as an engineer in the Advanced Technology Centre, Stealth Materials Group. He ran development and application engineering projects there, mostly using elastomeric and composite materials as radar absorbent or transparent media. These were applied to military aircraft, ships and vehicles. This work enabled him to develop strong project management skills and in his last year he led a team of engineers and scientists in developing a sprayable, radar absorbent coating for aircrafts. In 2003 Jonathan joined Cytec Engineered Materials, where he ran qualification testing programmes for aerospace composite materials and provided technical advice and assistance to customers, particularly in relation to processing issues. His customers included Airbus, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, with whom he worked to incorporate advanced, recently developed materials into their aircraft structures. Jonathan joined Hawkins in January 2007, where he trained in the investigation of fires and explosions to add to his engineering expertise. Jonathan has now been involved with a broad range of forensic engineering […]

Chris Dennis

In 2003, after completing his Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, Chris began work as a Design and Project Engineer at a small start-up engineering company. During this time he helped develop a revolutionary form of liquid disinfection equipment that utilised microwave-powered ultraviolet lamps. Due to the small size of the company, Chris was heavily involved in virtually all aspects of the projects, including liaising closely with suppliers and customers that were based both in the UK and overseas. In May 2007, the company was acquired by Severn Trent Services, allowing Chris to gain valuable experience working in a large multi-national engineering company. During this period, Chris continued to work on the ongoing development and testing of the different variants of the core technology. The work involved regular travel abroad, including helping to plan and run large scale field trials in the USA. After almost 7 years working on the same overall project, Chris decided he needed a new challenge, and so in 2010 he joined Hawkins as a Fire and Explosion Investigator. Since then, he has investigated several hundred incidents, ranging in scale from minor domestic fires, to multi-million pound losses involving industrial premises, commercial […]

Jonathan Dance

Jonathan graduated from The University of Exeter with a degree in Physics in 2019. During his time at university, Jonathan’s MPhys degree covered a wide range of topics including advanced quantum physics, condensed matter physics, electromagnetism and biophysics. He completed a master’s thesis focused on producing a 3D finite element analysis model of a section of the human spine from CT imagery, in order to better understand the role the endplate plays in distributing loads in the spine. Jonathan also spent a year living in Christchurch, New Zealand studying at Canterbury University as part of his degree. He now works alongside Ros Lambert-Porter with architects, manufacturers, facilities managers, and end-users to supply the following services: noise impact, room acoustics assessments, noise at work assessments, design consultation, vibration measurement, and consultation for product development. Jonathan joined Hawkins in November 2019 and is a Senior Acoustics Consultant based in our Cambridge Office.

John Camplin

John started his career in 1992 working as a research technician at the University of York, Chemistry Department where he provided technical support in analytical chemistry, polymer chemistry and surface analysis. In 1998 he was appointed research associate in the Physics Department investigating the optical effects of Giant Magneto Resistant (GMR) devices leading to the design and development of a Scanning Laser Microscope for GMR film mapping. In 2000 he moved to the University of California as a Research Assistant developing Scanning Tunneling Microscopes for the study of nanoscale surface structures. Two years later John moved back to the UK as a Principal Materials Scientist at BAE Systems InfraRed. There he took a key role in developing semi-conductor devices for InfraRed imaging, and computer models for semi-conductor optics. In 2005 John joined Hawkins. Having established himself in the field of fire investigation, he has also been involved in a broad range of forensic engineering investigations including road traffic accidents, mechanical vibration exposure, roller coasters and fairground equipment and semi-conductor engineering. John also has expertise in the areas of cryogenics, process engineering, vacuum engineering, optics and surface chemistry. John is a Principal Associate based in our Leeds Office.