Many engineers have stories of meetings getting off to a rocky start. For Victoria Fillingham, one began with being mistaken for the coffee server.
“I’ve seen a big change,” she says, “but I can tell you stories about being the facilitator of a meeting—bringing all these people together—only for some chaps to walk in, hand me their tea and coffee orders, and expect me to fetch them. I’d say, ‘This is my meeting. The tea and coffee machine is down there. Help yourself. We’ll wait until you’re back and settled.’”
That meeting was just one of the hurdles along Fillingham’s long and accomplished engineering journey—one that began with an engineering epiphany in elementary school. That moment led her to a degree in architecture and environmental engineering, followed by a doctorate. Today, she works in the Advisory Services unit of Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company and a leader in digital twins. She’s also a champion for women pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). On International Women’s Day, March 8, Fillingham emphasizes that more still needs to be done to inspire the next generation of girls to enter science and engineering fields.
Victoria Fillingham, Senior Digital ConsultantInspiring Girls toward STEM
Fillingham can pinpoint the moment she knew she wanted to be an engineer.
“It’s quite a visceral memory for me,” she says. Visiting a friend’s house when she was still in elementaryschool in Berkshire, England, Fillingham stumbled across an architectural model made by her friend’s father. “‘Gosh, but why is your dad building dolls’ houses?’ I wondered. And since then, I’ve been fascinated by the built environment as a subject.”
She’s helping others to have the same epiphany. It could involve an action as simple as one taken by Fillingham at her nephew’s recent Lego birthday party. “Lego is a gateway into the world of engineering and could be a simple tool to inspire girls to get ‘stuck in,’” she says.
But while the boys all got “stuck in,” she says, she noticed some of the girls were more tentative. “I went and sat next to one of the little girls,” Fillingham says. “‘Oh, what are you making?’ I asked. ‘Oh, what about that brick? And what about that part? And maybe you could do this,’ and [I was] trying to just inspire and make it known to them that they can do anything, that they’re not restricted.”
Carbon Data is Key
The old architectural model ignuted a fascination that would lead Fillingham to her current work with digital twins. These virtual models of real roads, bridges and even entire cities perfectly align with Fillingham’s expertise in using data to manage physical assets from design, through construction and operations.
Fillingham is Bentley’s senior digital transformation consultant and resident carbon specialist. In that role, she helps infrastructure owners and operators use data to delve into construction materials and get a deeper understanding of their carbon impact—and how they can mitigate it and achieve their net-zero goals. With nearly three quarters of carbon emissions worldwide linked to infrastructure, the sector could play a huge role in tackling climate change. To get there, however, means solving another massive challenge first: getting a handle on that carbon data. Infrastructure owners need to be able to measure and capture carbon information across the full lifespan of a building or piece of infrastructure–from design to decommissioning. That data needs to be high-quality and comparable, and it must be shared between each phase, from design to construction and operation. But that’s not always the case. “One of the big problems historically – and unfortunately, still today – is the handover between construction and the operations phase,” Fillingham says. “It used to be dubbed the ‘throwing it over the fence’ process, because it was literally going, ‘Here you go, have at it, see what works.’”
At worst, this can mean large amounts of data handed over without any guidance as to what it is or how it was created, and digital models “essentially just put on the shelf. Fillingham has focused on how to break down those siloes and aim for a more “joined-up, whole-life, end-to-end approach” for how data and information is created and used. “That’s been the running theme since starting my doctoral training back in 2013 to today, and even more so now that AI is here. It’s about creating that really solid data foundation, the information foundation, that can facilitate decision-making but also facilitate sustainable action for all parties – not just designers, the contractors, but everyone that’s involved with the creation and operation of this asset,” she says.
It’s what Fillingham calls “visualizing the carbon story.” (Fun fact: Fillingham’s LinkedIn profile has a carbon visualization feature of its own – her carbon dioxide birth number, which shows how much CO2 was in the atmosphere the year she was born.) She was recently part of a team working with U.K. transport agencies such as National Highways to help them standardize how they capture carbon data and figure out which changes could have the greatest impact in reducing their carbon footprint. Another agency, Irish Rail, which plans to halve carbon emissions by 2030, is a current client. Plus, she sees “exciting developments” in sectors such as oil-and-gas, where organizations are now looking at recalibrating its existing infrastructure to use as a carbon sink. “If we can make something that’s historically seen as being quite negative—in terms of being quite carbon heavy, contributing toward climate change—into something that’s very positive, that’s quite empowering,” she says. “Looking forward, that’s a huge opportunity for not just us, but [for] international knowledge and sharing of experience globally.”
Victoria Fillingham, second from left, and Bentley colleagues at the Women in Business Conference.Always On Her Toes
One early passion that has stayed with Fillingham is dance. She was part of the Royal Ballet School for a couple years and once danced with the Kirov Ballet when it toured The Sleeping Beauty. Fillingham hasn’t worked on any theatre project yet, but she says that “spatial awareness has definitely helped in terms of actually building models, those digital twins,” she says. “Having that spatial awareness and having that coordinated view and holistic view and the finite view, that’s definitely something that I use in my day-to-day job.”
That holistic view now includes artificial intelligence. She’s interested in ways that could lower the carbon impact of the massive data centers that service the AI sector and help it train large language models and other forms of generative AI. Data centers are also under scrutiny for how much energy they need to operate, as well as the millions of gallons of water they use every day to keep cool.
Fillingham imagines that we might be able to pair new data centers with mini biospheres to create and capture all that energy. “I feel like that might be something that you can see in the next year, couple of years, that’ll be a big thing,” she says.
Fillingham says she loves looking at the big picture, gathering facts and imagining the future. “I’m a curious person,” she says. “I guess it goes back to when [I was] drilling into my friend’s dad about what his models were doing, what his life was like in terms of work and architecture. That’s kind of been a running theme throughout my life: Always questioning.”
