Shini Somara
Shini Somara (born Shini Somarathne on July 30, 1979 in London) is a British mechanical engineer, broadcaster, producer and author who works to promote science and women in STEM. She studied at Henrietta Barnett School and Brunel University, earning an engineering degree and a Doctor of Engineering in 2003. Her PhD looked at dynamic thermal modelling using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), a way to simulate how heat and fluids move in machines.
Her broadcasting career began in 2011 with The Health Show on the BBC. She later hosted No Kitchen Required on BBC America and worked on TechKnow for Al Jazeera America. She has appeared on BBC, Sky Atlantic and PBS, and helped create Crash Course Physics (and later Crash Course Engineering) for PBS Digital Studios. She has also reported for Razor on CGTN and appeared on Science Channel’s Engineering Catastrophes. In 2017 she spoke at the United Nations about women and girls in STEM, and in 2018 she launched the Scilence podcast to give women in STEM a voice; it later grew into several other science podcasts.
Somara is a mentor at Imperial College London and serves on the E&T Innovation Awards advisory board for the IET. She has written seven STEM books for young readers, including Engineers Making a Difference, which was supported by Imperial College and The Gatsby Foundation and shortlisted for the Royal Society Young People's Book Prize in 2024. She also wrote An Engineer Like Me, the first in a series for younger readers (followed by A Scientist Like Me, A Coder Like Me and A Mathematician Like Me). In 2024 she was named one of the Top 50 Influential Women in Engineering.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 15:58 (CET).