Sakthy Selvakumaran (MEng, CEng, MICE, PhD) is the Isaac Newton Trust Fellow in Engineering at the University of Cambridge and the Founder of tech start-up BKwai: a software platform providing visualisations and data analytics for instrumentation and monitoring data in the construction sector, with an aim of improving resilience of built assets.
Sakthy is a Chartered Civil Engineer with over a decade of experience working internationally in design, construction and infrastructure asset management. These roles range from designing new structures on mega-projects like the Crossrail train line in London to working on sites to reconstruct housing destroyed by earthquakes in Peru. She has also worked in industry R&D roles for a construction company, developing new solutions and technologies to change the way infrastructure is designed, constructed and maintained. She returned to Cambridge from industry for her PhD, which applied rapidly advancing radar satellite imagery technologies which can monitor millimetre scale changes on the earth’s surface. She spent part of her doctoral training as a Visiting Researcher with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and received the Institute of Engineering Technology (IET) Leslie H Paddle Award for her work. Her achievements include being named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe List (2016), and the Financial Times Top 100 Most Influential Women in UK Engineering list (2020), and being appointed to the Young Professionals Panel of the National Infrastructure Commission for the UK Government (2018-2020).
