How WT’s first female director has spent 20 years working as an engineer in renewable energy and sustainability and is now leading Wood Thilsted’s Growth division during a crucial period of sustained growth for the company.
With Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Physics and Geophysics from NYU and Columbia University, Hannah has worked as an engineer in the renewable energy and sustainability sector since 2002, beginning her professional working life at a start-up in the tidal energy sector, Verdant Power, pioneering tidal resource assessment methodology and creating analysis tools for demonstrator tidal turbines in NYC. Skip forward to 2020, she made the move to Wood Thilsted and is now proud to be WT’s first female director. Hannah has worked on over 10 offshore wind farm projects across the world at both RES and Iberdrola, and her key invention is her T&I software that is now standard practice in the industry to model wind and wave conditions for installation of offshore wind farms.
Hannah founded a women’s working group to introduce a platform to talk about issues and opportunities available to women within the company. Being a woman within senior leadership, as well as a qualified organisation coach, Hannah is in a position where she coaches and mentors fellow employees, ensuring they feel supported across the business.
During a period of sustained growth, Hannah transformed the business information used to track company performance of tendering and business development, ensure the company is on track to sustainably expand and grow. She supported the business by implementing more structure and establishing new departments, including Marketing which provides a platform to increase visibility of what WT does thus enhancing the brand and external positioning of the company.
During her position as COO, she opened a discussion forum for all teams internally, providing an opportunity to ask questions to senior management, have more conversations surrounding mental health and wellbeing, and generally champion a more transparent communication style for the business. This helped the senior leadership team to become more personable, approachable, and open-minded – resulting in a company with culture at its core. During this time, Hannah has helped the business to grow from 60 employees to a global company of 150+ during COVID, whilst enhancing and improving the method of tendering and establishing robust data tracking to measure tendering performance.
If asked what makes Hannah one of a kind, colleagues would say her unrivalled combination of engineering and scientific diligence with her extraordinary people and communication skills – something that is unmatched in the industry, bringing warmth combined with technical rigour.
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