Profile

Professor Newnes gained her PhD from Loughborough University, where she worked as a full-time researcher in their Department of Manufacturing Engineering and undertook her PhD part-time.  She joined the University of Bath in 1991.

Research

Linda is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her research focuses is on whole life value analysis (monetary, environmental and societal costs)  from concept design through to the in-service/in-use phases. Core to determining value is her work in engineering design and manufacturing where she specialises in Transdisciplinary Engineering.  She leads a £1.8M, UKRI, EPSRC grant on TRansdisciplinary ENgineering Design (TREND), which aims to provide industry with the tools to enable effective transdisciplinary working.

All of her research is industry focussed and her impacts have created benefits and value to aerospace, defence, medical device design, oil and gas, green technologies, utilities to name a few.  Her research has evidenced cost savings of 63% through trade-off analysis between specification and cost for medical products, identified cost benefit analysis for the adoption of renewables in oil rich countries, enabled business model creation for innovation within the utilities sectors and created cost/time models for evolving  in-service support within the aerospace sector.  Through her industry Partnerships and Whole Life Value modelling, the need for Transdisciplinary working had been identified as essential to assist the challenges faced by industry today.

Typical industrial linked projects include

• Data analytics - automotive design - the 'real' cost of change
• TRansdisciplinary ENgineering Design -  TREND assisting industry to have the right tools, people and processes for Transdisciplinary working.
• Transdisciplinary working in the automotive sector.
• Socio-technical system models for Future Manufacturing.
• whole-Life Value - creating evolving whole life value models from cradle-to-cradle

Interested in supervising students across all industry sectors and within the over-arching areas of,

• Transdisciplinary Engineering
• Whole Life Value Modelling 
• Future Manufacturing - the road to 2050
• Business process modelling