The Demarcation of Andalusia, Ceuta and Melilla of the Association of Civil Engineers has awarded José Aguilar Medina, head of the Programme Management Office of the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility – Demo Oriented Neutron Source (IFMIF-DONES), as Engineer of the Year 2024, at a ceremony in Seville in front of almost a hundred attendees. The distinction rewards a visionary, versatile and courageous engineer, whose background and experience have led him to be involved in two of the most important international scientific projects linked to fusion energy – ITER in France and IFMIF-DONES in Granada -, committed to the profession and an ally for his Association.

The Dean of the Demarcation, Juan Manuel Medina Torres, praised his leadership and meteoric trajectory, making his way in the Engineering of the new era, in two first class international exponents that are called to change the lives of many people. ‘It is an example that Civil Engineers can go wherever they want and multiply their contribution to society while maintaining their spirit of public service’.

He recalled that the Granada project, where the materials of the future fusion reactors will be tested for the generation of clean and inexhaustible energy by the middle of the century, will be a revolution for the province, the community and Spain. ‘Hundreds of millions are arriving in tenders for works, for unique projects that will be a challenge for current engineering and where 30% of the technical staff are ICCPs’, emphasised the Dean. Medina Torres pointed to increases in production of around 6,000 million euros nationally and 2,000 million in Granada, with the creation of more than 50,000 direct and indirect jobs in Spain throughout the life cycle of IFMIF-DONES, 12,000 of them in the province of Granada. At the head of this historic scientific milestone is ‘our Engineer of the Year’, José Aguilar Medina, unanimously elected by the Governing Board of the Demarcation.

The award winner expressed his gratitude for the recognition, which ‘fills him with motivation and enthusiasm to continue doing my work with the dignity and passion that the profession deserves’. He recalled the three vertices of the triangle that gives balance to his life: the companies he has worked for, such as Dragados and Acciona, which allowed him to take the steps and accumulate the experience to now form part of the project ‘called to change my life’; the projects that ‘reach you’ and are like yellow tiles towards your destiny, of which he mentioned Repsol’s C-10 in Cartagena, ITER – in which half of humanity participates – and IFMIF-DONES, ‘the largest scientific infrastructure in Spain’ that aims to emulate the sun on earth, ‘which is my present and I intend it to be my future’; and, the most important side of the triangle, the people who have made up the teams he has worked with, but above all his family, his wife and daughter, ‘his engineers of the year’.

Balance

Aguilar Medina had claimed in one of his speeches that ‘the engineer must continue to be the centre of decision making, technical and political, to avoid things like those that have happened with the Dana’. A message that coincided with that defended by the Dean in his speech, who insisted on the need for a national consensus on water and the recovery of investments that make the excellent water planning that already exists a reality. ‘We cannot and must not accept that a tragedy of this magnitude should happen again, we must make the technical recommendations prevail with a united, strong and clear voice,’ stressed Medina Torres.

He assured that the visibility of the technical capacity of Civil Engineers achieved in this DANA, together with other actions in favour of the recovery of ‘our space of public influence’, must contribute to sustain an improvement in the remuneration conditions of our professionals – lost during the last crises -, to demand investment stability for the sector and to ensure that our companies do not work at a loss. The Dean listed the actions initiated at national level to strengthen this sectoral position and defend the profession’s competences: such as the creation of the Public Works Investment Observatory, the promotion of the Platform for Employment Quality, the presentation of the Law for the Regulation of the Quality and Sustainability of Public Works and Civil Engineering, the signing of agreements for the endorsement of works, legal defence and the implementation of the Academic Programme with Successive Pathways in schools.

Source: Demarcation of Andalusia, Ceuta and Melilla of the CICCP