Prof. Alan Banks

Thursday, 29 February 2024

Alan Banks is the Lightweight Structures Supervisor within Innovation and Research at Ford Motor Company. He started work at Ford in 1983 as an apprentice and worked in Chassis Engineering responsible for suspension systems on commercial vehicles until 2019 before his move to Innovation and Research.

His remit with the Innovation and Research team is to lead projects with light-weighting technologies and applications in design with mass production capability. This remit includes material choices from advanced steel to full composite structures, including hybrid technology to produce the best value for automotive applications.

Alan is responsible for a team of 8 engineers with a team of distributed global engineers who help develop Test Driven Development as well as Behavioural Driven Development to ensure customer expectations are met as well as component specifications for lightweight application technology.

He was the team leader on the Composite Lightweight Automotive Suspension System (CLASS) project, which won the JEC World Automotive Application Innovation category in 2018. He is also leading the Composite Hybrid Automotive Suspension System Innovative Structures (CHASSIS) project due for completion in 2021 and has 8 patents to his name.

Alan has a First-Class Honours Degree and an MSc from the University of Bradford in the UK, is a Fellow and Chartered Engineer with the Institute of Engineering Technology and a Fellow of the Institute of Innovation and Knowledge Exchange, as well as a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers. He is also on the Research Board of The Welding Institute Research Committee and a Director of the Board for the Composites UK Trade Association. He is Chairman of the Vehicular Composites Group and the Lightweighting UK Auto Council Strategy Group.