SNAME Blog

Happy New Year to all SNAME’s members worldwide. As a Scot by birth, with a mother who was a well-known reciter of Burn’s poetry, I can sing Auld Lang Syne with an appropriate accent, at least after a drink or two.

Hopefully this is not all I’ll be able to bring to my new role as SNAME President. I have to fill the distinguished shoes not only of Suzanne Beckstoffer, but of a very long series of eminent members of the profession, a gratifying number of whom are still very active contributors to the Society. I look forward to following their example and to continuing to benefit from their guidance.

For those of you who I have not yet had a chance to meet in person or virtually, I’d like to give a very quick sketch of my background, and of some aspects of SNAME’s influence on my career. I’m a graduate of University College, London, through the program sponsored by the UK Ministry of Defence for the grand old professional designation of naval constructors. I moved to Canada in 1981, and immediately joined SNAME as part of the very active Montreal sub-section of the Eastern Canadian section. This was a tremendous resource for a new immigrant and allowed me to develop relationships that I have benefited from ever since, and formed the foundation for a much wider set at the regional, national and international levels.

My career path has involved ship design, research and development, work on national and international regulations, and an eclectic mix of marine-ish consultancy work for public and private sector clients. Over its course I accumulated several bookshelves full of Transactions, back issues of Marine Technology, T&R bulletins and other SNAME publications until my wife forced me to abandon them to an ex-employer. I am now forced into electronic forms of pack-rat behaviour, with a couple of poorly indexed external hard-drives of miscellaneous stuff. A lot of this relates to polar ship technology and operation, which has been one of my areas of greatest interest now for 40 years. A succession of SNAME Icetech conferences were both professionally valuable and socially great fun.

Hopefully by some point in 2021 we will be able to pick up many of the best aspects of the “old normal”, including in-person events. However, the pandemic has also forced all of us - including SNAME -to find new ways to accomplish our missions and objectives. One of my own objectives over the next two years will be to help to meld the most valuable elements of the old and the new into programs and products that can help every SNAME member at every stage in your career. I look forward to hearing from you with your own suggestions as to how we can do this together