Background
Nada is a doctoral researcher at Loughborough University, investigating the current inclusive placement and employment strategies within engineering for the recruitment of diverse engineering graduates.
Nada’s research dissects how identity affects the career outcomes of engineering graduates, focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity and socio-economic factors. Her research focuses on how universities and companies can co-create strategies and policies that lead to better career outcomes for underrepresented engineering graduates to ultimately diversify the current UK engineering workforce.
Prior to starting her research at Loughborough, Nada holds a B.Sc. in Biotechnology and an M.Sc. in Science in Society from Radboud University, where she researched Dutch Academia’s Gender Policies and their effects on the Experiences of Female Scientists in the Netherlands.
Key Interests:
- Equal Career Outcomes
- Inclusive Employment
- Inclusive Recruitment Strategies
- Future Engineering Workforce
- EDI in engineering
- EDI in the workplace
- Intersectional Identities
- Interdisciplinary Research
- Social Policy
- Co-Creation Modelling
- Mixed Methods
- Journey Mapping
Research
Creating Equitable Placement and Employment Processes for Diverse Engineering Graduates
PGR Supervisors: Dr Elizabeth Ratcliffe and Dr Laura Justham
The study investigates the current inclusive placement and employment strategies within engineering for the recruitment of diverse engineering graduates.
The research dissects how identity affects the career outcomes of engineering graduates, focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity and socio-economic factors. Her research focuses on how universities and companies can co-create strategies that lead to better career outcomes for underrepresented engineering graduates to diversify the current UK engineering workforce.
The project seeks to showcase the lived experiences of diverse graduates and their struggles in balancing their intersectional identities while chasing equal career outcomes. The study aims to use these experiences to better inform strategies, policies, and interventions and to challenge the notion of who gets to be the ideal engineer.
The study uses a mixed methods-based approach to collect qualitative and quantitative data to create a holistic picture of the issue while looking into discipline-specific factors affecting the various sectors within engineering. The thesis adopts a co-creation-based approach, where all stakeholders involved (universities, companies and students) understand each other's perspective and work together to create transformational change.