Dr Ursula Lawrence
Associate Director of Engineering Geology - Capita Real Estate and Infrastructure
Bachelor of Science (Honours, Geology), Master of Science (Geotechnical Engineering), Doctorate of Philosophy (Civil Engineering)
November 2021
Dr Ursula Lawrence is Associate Director of Engineering Geology at Capita Real Estate and Infrastructure. Ursula is an engineering geologist, which means she works across the interface between geology and civil engineering.
Engineering geologists, like Ursula, design foundations, retaining walls, shafts and slopes, primarily for infrastructure such as roads, railways and airports. They also repair or prevent geohazards (landslides, sinkholes, flooding, subsidence).
In her role, Ursula mostly works on large infrastructure projects, including Crossrail (a new underground railway across London) and 160km of a new high speed railway through the Midlands in the United Kingdom.
Why did you choose this career pathway?
It was luck really. I graduated in 1987. Over the previous three years the price of oil had been consistently falling. The common pathways for geologists were closing. I heard through the grapevine about a job in a soils testing laboratory, that led to working in the team who used the test results: the ground engineering team. The rest is history.
Ursula on a site visit in south London. The site is of special scientific interest and needed clearing back to protect it and also to improve access.
What are the best parts about your job?
What are the hardest parts?
The best parts:
1. Every day is different. Even when you work for 7 or 8 years on the same projects it goes through phases, e.g. design or construction.
2. You invest your energy in building something and it becomes part of you. I drive through a tunnel under the river Medway and think of it as my tunnel, my Crossrail tunnels, my bypass. You get a sense of pride.
The hardest parts:
1. Making up for lack of resources.
2. Balancing the need to meet a deadline but still help colleagues develop at a pace that doesn’t take them too far out of their comfort zone.
3. Trying to balance what needs to be done against the available program and budget.
A train in the London Underground. Ursula works on infrastructure projects, including Crossrail - a new underground railway in London.
What are the major challenges in your field?
1. Lack of resources. Half of all engineers will retire in the next 15 years. We are already seeing the first impacts of this as large projects are delivered by joint ventures rather than individual companies. Large companies are buying out smaller companies to grow their teams. Competition is reducing.
2. Climate change resiliency. Climate change predictions are for more intense rainfall which is overwhelming current drainage systems and causing landslides, and hotter summers which changes vegetation and adversely affects some clay soils causes disruption to roads and railways. Increasingly, we are taking climate change predictions into account in our designs to make infrastructure more resilient.
3. Reducing environmental impact. Increasingly, infrastructure is being built within smaller areas or enlarged within the same boundaries. Engineering is becoming more complex. Our biggest risk/unknown is what people have done to the ground before us. Trying to make the most use of soils excavated within our site can mean cleaning up someone else’s mess.
How well did your degree prepare you for your career path?
I use a mix of subjects in my job: primarily rock mechanics, stratigraphy, sedimentology. We consider the stresses that the bedrock has been subjected to that might impact how the soil behaves. Palaeogeography controls on facies distribution to predict any variation in strength, compressibility and permeability that will impact how the soil behaves in an engineering environment.
I live and work in the south of England so primarily deal with soft ‘rocks’, so understanding sedimentology and carbonate rocks is helpful. The ground model is the most important part of our job and the ability to draw/check 2D (long and cross sections) and more recently 3D models is a key skill. One of my graduates made me laugh. At Uni he would draw cross sections but couldn’t conceive of any situation when they might actually be used. The first thing I got him to do in my team working on a high speed rail project was to … update a long section for the 80km of route!
Engineering is involved in designing green energy technologies like wind turbines to help fight climate change.
What advice would you give to students in your study area trying to decide on a career path?
Whichever career path you go down you can never start too early to prepare for professional qualifications (Chartership). You’ll put the same amount of effort in whether you do it gradually from the start or all at once at the end so save yourself the stress and start early.
Think outside the box. Engineering is a big field to move into. It is involved in solving the big climate change and environmental challenges we face not just for infrastructure but also designing the foundations for wind turbines, reducing environmental impact of the developing society by reuse of sites or going underground. We are helping to protect urban centres through flood protection schemes and rewilding of upstream areas. The continued retirement of engineers and geologists will lead to more and more opportunities. The learning path is becoming steeper but if you are up for the challenge it really can take you around the world.
Anything else you’d like people to know about your job?
Engineering has a reputation for being heavy and dirty. It isn’t so much these days. Increasingly design is computerised with increasingly sophisticated programs. Health and safety has done a lot for cleaning up sites. Health and safety combined with lack of resources mean that increasingly machines rather than brawn does the work, with some of these in dangerous areas being remote controlled. Great emphasis is put on professional and respectful behaviours that are welcoming of diversity.
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Ursula has been involved with the Engineering Group of the Geological Society since 2006. She’s currently Chair and also involved in producing two special publications (Groundwater and Weathering). Time permitting, she still studies and writes papers about her research topic.
Connect with Ursula