Inside the Engine Room of Maritime Research – From Engine Rooms to Ethics Committees

The UK Army's somewhat famous Mexe Float. A Enjoyable deployment for the author.

After more than 20 years as an engineer in the marine industry, I did something unexpected.

I went back to university.

Not for a short course or a refresh. Not for a bit of upskilling or a bit of a break from the norm. But to start a full-time PhD focused on the decarbonisation of the inland waterways. As someone who’s spent the bulk of his adult life solving real-world problems across shipyards, engine rooms, design offices and on the water, stepping into the academic world was — to put it mildly — a shock to my system.

First day at Newcastle University to start my PhD

There’s a reason most engineers don’t voluntarily sign up to spend three years talking about methodology, epistemology, and systems theory. But here I am — and over the coming months, I’ll be sharing the real story of what happens when a stoic industry professional walks into a world built on citations, academic frameworks, and often baffling expectations that seem to make little sense.

This is not going to be your average academic blog.

From real-world chaos to conceptual clarity.

I’m a Class One Marine Engineer trained by the British Army, and for the better part of two decades, my job was to fix things, either hands on on the vessel or at the concept and design stage often under vigorous testing conditions. I’ve worked across Europe, the Middle East, America, and beyond in some of the most incredible places that were usually too hot, too cold, too chaotic, or too far from a decent cup of tea. I’ve been in shipyards in Iceland, dry docks in Norway, project teams in New York, and muddy quaysides in the South East of England.

I’ve diagnosed failing power systems in the dark. I’ve rebuilt drive trains while surrounded by people shouting in three different languages, but you can usually tell a swear word in any language!. I’ve had to design around missing parts, budget constraints, and tight deadlines — all while making sure the vessel was back into service by Monday morning at the very latest – Its Sunday afternoon.

In those environments, success isn’t about theoretical optimisation — it’s about keeping things working, keeping the propellers of the maritime industry turning and making sure the vessel is ready to pay the wages of those who are reliant on its ability to operate. Much of the time you are making decisions with partial information. Prioritising function over perfection. And finding solutions that can survive saltwater, bad wiring, and, more often than not, human error.

Now? I sit in my tiny home office most days, built exactly for this reason, trying to model the energy demand of inland waterway vessels in an effort to try and help the industry move towards a greener zero-emission future.

Feet up in my tiny home office

 Academia doesn’t run on diesel

Coming from industry, you get used to cutting to the chase, because if you don’t, someone will push you aside with their way of fixing things.  If you’re wise you’ll make the right decisions at the right time and establish yourself as a ‘can-do’engineer. If something doesn’t work, you take it apart and fix it. You look at the problem in front of you, weigh up the constraints, and get to work. You don’t need a seminar to determine whether the gearbox is broken or not – You’ve got years of hands-on experience telling you precisely what the issue is, so why pause, just get on with it.

In academia, the approach is different. Problems are first interrogated from multiple angles. You explore their ‘historicity,” their ‘discursive framing,’  their ‘emergence in the literature.’  You are encouraged — if not required — to reflect on your ‘positionality’ before you touch anything at all.  And don’t even think of having a solution to any specific problem or question because that’s when the academic frowns really come out.

Think of it this way, it’s like trying to fix a broken bilge pump by first doing a 2,000-word critique of bilge philosophy.  To do that, you’ll first need to read hundreds of research papers on the ‘bilge pump problem’ and then look for a gap in that research that might help the engineers of the future not have this problem in the first place.  This doesn’t help fix this bilge pump, but it might help not having the same problems in the future.

I’m not going to lie, at first and even now, I struggle with this way of working. I often feel like I am the only one in the room who wants to do something  while it seems like everyone else just wants to talk about doing something. But over time, I have slowly started to see that what feels like inertia is actually deep work — the hard grind of shaping ideas that are durable enough to stand up in multiple contexts.  This is an important part of engineering and development.  We are not fixing todays problems, there are engineers like me on the ground doing that, we are looking at how to solve long term and often deeply complex problems, and without this work, we’ll keep having to fix the same old problems.

I still miss the urgency of the engine room, it makes you feel important when you fix something and save the day. But I’m learning that not every problem should be rushed. Especially not the ones that involve rethinking how we power an entire transport sector.

Writing with both hands tied

One of the steepest hills to climb coming back to university was learning how to write like an academic. In industry, writing is a tool: you write specs, proposals, reports. You get to the point, you make it readable, and you move on to the next task.

In academia, writing is everything. It’s not just communication — it’s the very currency of your work. And it comes with rules. You must signal your awareness of existing thought. You must justify your approach. You must make the invisible visible: assumptions, biases, gaps, alternatives.

I’m confident enough in my knowledge and understanding of my specialist areas of marine power and propulsion that if I handed in an industry-style report on energy delivery infrastructure, I know I’d get top marks for clarity and efficiency. In academia, that same report would get politely shredded for lacking theoretical depth, methodological transparency, and engagement with the literature.  So, when I turned up on the first day of my PhD with all these grand ideas about how to fix the worlds problems (at least those focused on the decarbonisation of the inland waterways at least) I very quickly realised that it’s not the answers that would be getting me top marks – it’s the questions that I will be asking and then how I would frame the methodology to answer those questions that would allow me to shine – My reputation in the marine industry is respected here, but it carries no currency at all.

Winning the Newcastle University 3 Minute Thesis Award has helped me phrase my work into a manageable chunk that the layman can understand - If you have 3 minutes that is!

So, I have had to start again. I’m learning how to argue without asserting my own knowledge and experience, and if you know me then you’ll know how hard that is for me – I do love to be right. I’m learning how to reference other people’s work in support of my own research and without parroting. It’s tough, and at times I’ve felt like a phony, pretending to have an academic voice that felt like I was doing a bad impression of someone else.  Some people call this imposter syndrome.

Its been months, and I’m still learning and expect to be learning long into my PhD. But I feel that I’m now at the point where I can at least write something meaningful and get it through the scrutiny of my supervisory team, and whilst its been tricky at times, they have been a great support in helping me find this new, slightly weird voice — and honestly, that feels like its own form of engineering.

Why the PhD?

People ask me a lot why I’m doing this — “Why did you give up that well paid job?”  “Why did you give up all those travel perks, the health insurance and the security?”  The answers to these questions are still not fully formed and so when I try to respond the confusion grows a little more, especially when they hear I spend most of my time writing things in a way I don’t understand fully and talking to people much smarter and more knowledgeable on the subject than me.  It’s a question that most PhD students dread – “What’s your PhD about?” – It’s very hard to answer that question simply, whilst trying not to send the unfortunate inquirer into a deep sleep.

In my mind the answer is simple: ‘because I got tired of watching the wrong conversations dominate the decisions which then set the wrong direction’ – (I wrote this sentence about 20 times, and I’m still only about 63% happy with it!) 

The maritime industry is full of big claims and green promises. Electric vessels! Hydrogen ports! Methanol-ready tankers! But underneath it all, we’re still very short on infrastructure. Nobody seems to be asking the obvious question: “how are we going to supply the energy to make this work?”

This isn’t a “build it and they will come” situation. Vessels can’t operate on ideology. They need kilowatt-hours — delivered consistently, affordably, and in line with their real-world duty cycles.

So, I decided to step away from fixing one problem at a time — and instead try to understand the systemic problem. To dig into the infrastructure gaps, the policy misfires, the operational blind spots. To build something that helps us deliver not just green vessels, but green operations.

Working with BAE Systems was all about designing power and propulsion for the zero-emission journey. The solutions are out there, not just from BAE but from a whole host of manufacturers. Their systems are useless though if they cant get energy to the vessel when and where its needed.

This PhD isn’t a retreat from industry. It’s my personal commitment to help shape its future — with facts, data, and hopefully a bit of common sense.  I’ve always talked about wanting to leave a legacy when I’m gone, and if I’ve helped even a little bit to make the world a better place for my kin, then I think I will have achieved that.

When engineering meets “epistemology”

What’s been hardest isn’t the complexity, I do love a challenge — it’s the mindset shift.

In industry, you’re rewarded for speed, adaptability, and gut instinct. In academia, you’re rewarded for precision, reflection, and structured argument – You don’t need an answer, but you do need to frame the questions deeply enough to elicit some deeper thought.

Sometimes I feel like I’m switching between two completely different operating systems. One half of me wants to prototype a solution and get it tested on the water, and of course my mind is constantly doing that, I can’t seem to stop it. The other half? Well, I’m forcing it to think in a different way to justify every decision with a paper from 2018 and a line from Foucault.

There’s a real tension there — but there’s also power in it. I believe my experience will allow me to spot things academics might sometimes miss, to see things differently, to understand that academia should serve industry in the long run. But academia gives me the space to understand why these things are being missed — and what it might take to get them fixed.

A few learning moments

I’d be lying if I said it’s all gone smoothly.

In the early stages I submitted my project proposals that made sense to me as an engineer but probably sounded like Martian to my supervisors. I’ve asked many “naïve” questions along the way but some of them lead to conversations in little obscure conferences that then poke massive holes in people’s assumptions.  I once spent three days trying to understand a sentence in a journal article — only to discover when reaching out to the author, that they didn’t quite understand it either.

I also discovered that some parts of the academic world are, let’s say, allergic to criticism — especially when it comes from someone asking awkward questions about practical outcomes.  I’m a big question asker, but I’ve had to reign that in - a lot.  People are finding it hard enough to understand their own research without some smart-Alec coming along with random questions.

But I’ve also had moments of clarity by talking to people, to other researchers, regardless of their areas of study, to industry professionals with my new academic hat on, and to those not at all connected who don’t carry any baggage on the subject or situation at all. There are conversations where things start to click. People seemingly understand what I’m saying and look to collaborate, and collaboration with industry operators is crucial to my research outcomes.   I have a growing recognition that my outsider perspective isn’t a weakness — it’s exactly what this academic space needs more of.

Where this is heading

I am writing this column that will follow my PhD journey — not as a linear tale of progress, but as an honest look at what it takes to research something that matters, in the hope that I can help just one person feel okay about making the same switch from industry to academia and making the same findings and mistakes – the world needs engineers to frame the right questions.

My PhD is focused on the decarbonisation of the inland waterways and so in future I’ll be writing about energy delivery, emissions, mobile infrastructure, operator behaviour, data challenges, politics, and more. I’ll also talk openly about the process itself — the weirdness, the breakthroughs, the dead ends, and the victories (small and large).

It’s for anyone who works in or around the maritime space and wants to understand what’s really going on behind the glossy brochures and pilot projects. It’s for the boat operators who keep things moving, the policymakers trying to steer the ship, and the engineers who just want things to work.

Most of all, it’s for anyone who still believes that shipping can change — but only if we’re honest about where we are, and serious about where we’re going.

So, buckle up. This isn’t going to be tidy. But it is going to be real.

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Paul Simavari - ZEIWW and Newcastle University Researcher

Marine engineer, researcher, and advocate for practical decarbonisation of Europe’s inland waterways. I write to share insights, challenges, and progress from my PhD journey — with the aim of turning data into real-world solutions that work for the people who rely on these waterways every day.

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