On April 23rd, 2019, Dr. Michael J de C Henshaw，professor of Loughborough University was invited to the Department of Construction Management and gave an impressive presentation with the topic of “The Role of Systems Engineering in Innovation and Resilience”.

At the beginning, Prof. Nan Li gave a brief introduction of Prof.Henshaw. Prof. Henshaw is Programme Director of the Systems Engineering MSc. and leads the Loughborough University research challenge in Secure and Resilient Societies, which integrates technical, societal, and humanities disciplines to create solutions to natural and manmade threats to society. Much of his work concerns the integration of complex networked systems with contributions in Systems of Systems (SoS) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) research.

In his presentation, Prof. Henshaw provided an overview of Systems Engineering and demonstrated its essential role in innovation. He pointed out that Systems Engineering should be a skill that is developed in all engineers and that an appreciation of “Systems of Systems” engineering is essential for modern complex systems innovation. Various of cases and examples were proposed during his talk.

After that, Prof. Henshaw had a deep discussion with the audience. He also offered valued advices for each Ph.D.’s research from the perspective of systems engineering.