Karen started her career in 1990 at Ontario Hydro, the precursor to Ontario Power Generation (OPG) who will be building the first small modular reactor (SMR) in North America, the GE Hitachi BWRX-300. Throughout her 33-year career, Karen has worked in a wide variety of roles, in consultancies, design organizations, manufacturers and, for 10 years, as an independent contractor. Karen’s career has been a mix of both systems engineering and human factors engineering (HFE), largely in high-hazard industries, including defense, rail, oil and gas, and nuclear. Civil nuclear has been her focus for the past 18 years, with 15 of those spent living and working in the United Kingdom (UK). She spent 6 years supporting the Hitachi-GE and Horizon UK ABWR new build project, leading the HFE, helping modernize the existing ABWR interface designs during the Generic Design Assessment for 4 years, and then acting as HFE Manager for the EPC contract and the Architect Engineer for the site-specific phase, until the project was canceled. In early 2022, she joined GE Hitachi SMR Technologies Canada Ltd., where she worked for 21 months leading the HFE team and 3 months as a Senior Systems Engineer in the Plant Systems Integration team. In January this year, Karen left GE Hitachi to join the innovative and forward-moving consultancy Nuclear Promise X (NPX), growing their engineering business and providing specialist engineering services to existing operating organizations and new build clients. NPX is particularly focused on advancing engineering within nuclear to be able to support implementation of new digital technologies within existing and new plant designs. Karen has a Bachelors of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering with a Human Factors minor from University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She is an Ontario-licensed Professional Engineer, a Chartered Fellow of the UK Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors, and a member of the International Council On Systems Engineering.