Alice Delahunty, 26, electrical engineer, E.ON UK

The UK’s top young female engineer once spent an entire weekend rewiring a small house. So what, you might say. You’d expect someone in that business to know one end of a screwdriver from the other. But you may be more impressed to hear that she was 10 at the time and the house concerned belonged to her dolls.

Fifteen tiny lights and a dimmer switch later, Alice Delahunty was told that she should make the most of her natural skills and has since gone on to win the 2007 Institution of Engineering and Technology’s (IET) Young Woman Engineer of the Year award.

But deciding on which career path to take wasn’t a straightforward decision. “At school I was torn between art and design and engineering, even though my physics teacher encouraged me to do the latter,” she says. After doing some work experience in a graphic design office, as well as with a company that made armoured cars for Nato and spaceship parts for Nasa, her mind was made up. After completing her electrical engineering degree and a masters in management science at University College Dublin, she joined E.ON, the power and gas company, as a graduate trainee.

Now team leader in emergent technologies, Delahunty looks at how people use and think about electricity. “We’re exploring a wide range of ideas including how mobile phone and internet technologies can tell people how much energy they’re using, and possibly even change those patterns.”

Working for a company where “everyone mucks in” and variety is encouraged means that she can have more than one string to her bow. E.ON both generates and distributes electricity, and during the summer, when the demand is lower, Delahunty travels the country testing generators and making sure everything is working well. “It’s quite a varied job and it’s just as important keeping the existing plants running efficiently and in an environmentally sound way as it is understanding how things should work in the future.”

As the “woman engineer of the year” title would suggest, she’s also a bit of a role model and encourages other young people to do what she does, recently giving the IET’s Faraday Lecture to 13 to 15-year-olds on how technology can save the planet.

Has there ever been any problem being a woman in a man’s world? “I’ve always found people to be very encouraging. There are many more younger people coming into the industry now and it’s attracting more women than it did in the past.”

So what’s next? “There are so many projects. I’d like to work on the project team for a new power station, whether it’s a wind farm, one that uses marine energy or clean coal power.”

And if all else fails, there’s always doll’s house renovation.

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