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With experience across a range of fields including civil engineering, engineering education, volunteering and humanitarian aid, her career has been, she admits, fairly eclectic.

Now, as the 2021 recipient of Engineers Australias Peter Nicol Russell Achievement Memorial Medal, Taylor has been recognised for her many professional accomplishments. She shares some of her career highlights with create.

Its challenging to describe Taylors achievements without resorting to basic recitation.

Shes held roles in academia and defence, received the prestigious Ada Lovelace Medal for an Outstanding Woman Engineer in 2019, and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2004.

In addition to serving as Deputy Chair of the Governing Group of the International Engineering Alliance, she is the Foundation Convenor of Engineers Australias National Women in Engineering Committee and Chair of the Cambodian Childrens Trust.

While Pro-Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean at Central Queensland University, she engaged in pro bono work for Registered Engineers for Disaster Relief, or RedR, an international humanitarian response agency that selects, trains and deploys technical specialists.

The trajectory of Taylors eventual career was at odds with her plans earlier in life.

I was one of those people at school who had no idea what I wanted to do, she said. I ended up being one of 250 people doing civil engineering, which I knew absolutely nothing about and for most of the time I was the only girl.

After a decade as an engineer for the Maritime Service Board, Taylor made a career shift to academia.

At that point I was in a career that did not support women very well when they started to have children, she said.

You could say I had to respond to both life imperatives and career imperatives. It was certainly not my planned career path; it was the outcome of my situation at the time.

Taylors diverse and eclectic career has led her to excel as a leader, notably in the field of engineering education.

As an academic, I was very strongly involved in curriculum reform to bring out the human element of engineering, she said. When I started out, engineering was very much about being above petty politics and the way society made decisions we were independent of having opinions.

For me, it was important to bring into the curriculum an understanding that this was not the case. We are all human beings, and therefore all have our own opinions and perspectives that impact how we make decisions.

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Engineering education pioneer Elizabeth Taylor on challenging assumptions and bringing more voices to the table - Create - create digital