Why Engineers Matter – One Engineer’s Story

Our speaker, Marilyn Spink will provide an overview of several key projects and disruptive technologies over her 30+ engineering career. She will share a wide range of her involvement and experiences of executing  large, complex minerals/metallurgical projects such as the Ambatovy Nickely Laterite Mega Project in Madagascar, steel plant upgrades and modernization in North America and Tunisia, mining backfill plants construction and commissioning in India and the Northwest Territories, and even Nato Military Camp equipment design!. Spink will then explain what compelled her to get involved with PEO Council at this stage of her career, and conclude by describing what she has learned in her four years on PEO Council.

Join us for an interactive presentation on Why Engineers Matter – your participation is key to the quality of the discussion:

• Lessons learned leading and managing multidiscipline teams to deliver large complex engineering projects
• Why engineers should always have a broad mindset of the definition of “Public Interest”
• What are the roles of PEO and OSPE and why having these distinct & separate organizations is beneficial for our engineering profession
• What, we as engaged engineers with PEO Chapters, need to do to evolve our profession, focusing on our regulatory mandate, so we can remain a strong & relevant, self-regulated profession and “Own Our Future”

Whether you are an engineer or an engineering intern, the goal of this interactive presentation is to shift our thinking about the value our profession provides society especially in the successfully delivery of large complex engineering projects and how we might think differently about our own profession and our role in it as Engineers.

Marilyn Spink began her 30-year engineering career in Northern Ontario’s mining, pulp and paper industries and then moved to steelmaking operations in both the US and Canada. After executing capital projects with Dofasco, she moved to consulting engineering working on large, global complex minerals projects. At Hatch, SNC-Lavalin, Wardrop (now Tetra Tech) and Golder Associates, as a multi-discipline engineering manager and a process engineer at heart, she led and supported teams of professional engineers and designers. She is now mentoring engineers and project managers with Isherwood Geostructural Engineers. She has been a licensed professional engineer (PEO) since 1995, a member of the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE) since its inception. In 2014, she was appointed the lieutenant governor appointee to PEO Council. Spink is married to Jamie Gerson, also a professional engineer, who is extremely supportive of all her interests and a wonderful father to their three children. Spink can be reached at mspink@peo.on.ca.

Friends are welcome and networking encouraged!