This year’s new Fellows, announced in the year of the Academy’s 50th anniversary, are making an incredible impact across the engineering and technology sector with innovations in clean energy, AI, medicine and public health. These leading figures have influenced academia and business, worked to widen participation in engineering for people from underrepresented backgrounds, and provided expert policy advice to government.
Research in our Faculty continues to drive innovation and being recognised for our outstanding contributions to engineering and technology highlights the impact of our research. It is fantastic that three of our academics have been elected to the Royal Academy of Engineering this year. "
Professor Conchúr Ó Brádaigh
Vice-President and Head of the Faculty of Engineering
Professor Meihong Wang, School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering, is a chartered chemical engineer and Fellow of IET. He is distinguished for academic leadership and pioneering research in systems engineering for carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), to address the global challenge of carbon neutrality. His innovative research on solvent-based carbon capture and its intensification, integrated capture and utilisation, and CO2 transport has guided process design, operation and control of CCUS, as evidenced by several international prizes, real-life applications and policy impact. He has played an important role in training next-generation engineers in his field and significantly expanded systems and CCUS research in Asia and Africa.
Professor Ian Reaney, School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering, is Dyson Chair and Professor in Ceramics at the University of Sheffield. Professor Reaney’s work is industrially led, having worked with lika Technology, Greatcell Solar, Johnson Tiles and Sarantel. He developed new microwave dielectric ceramics to meet the demands of the expanding 3G and 4G cellular networks. This led to commercialization with Filtronic Comtek and Suzhou Dongshan Precision Manufacturing Co Ltd. He is Director of the Transforming the Foundation Industries Network whose KPIs included the funding of 34 projects within the Foundation Industries, and he is the European Site Director for the Center for Dielectrics and Piezoelectrics (CDP).
Professor James Marshall, School of Computer Science, and the Centre for Machine Intelligence (CMI), is an international expert in bio-inspired robotics and Director of the Centre for Machine Intelligence at the University of Sheffield. In 2020, he co-founded Opteran Technologies to commercialise his research. Opteran has gained significant investment and recognition, winning multiple awards. Through understanding the brain, Opteran is disrupting navigation technology for robotics with a new class of algorithms. As Founder Science Officer, Marshall continues to shape Opteran’s research strategy and vision for long-term advances in AI for robotics. As an academic he has published widely on this topic for academic and general audiences.
The new Fellows will be formally admitted to the Academy at a special ceremony in London on 19 October, when each Fellow will sign the roll book. In joining the Fellowship, they will lend their unique capabilities to achieving the Academy’s overarching strategic goal to engineer better lives.
Sir John Lazar CBE FREng, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: “As we celebrate our 50th anniversary this year, we also mark the Academy’s achievements since it was founded as the Fellowship of Engineering on 11 June 1976 at Buckingham Palace, with the enthusiastic backing of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, our Founding Senior Fellow. Our Fellowship has been at the core of our work for the past 50 years, connecting the businesses leaders, entrepreneurs, researchers and policymakers who are at the heart of the UK’s technological progress.
“This year’s cohort will be joining a community of over 1,700 top engineers and innovators in the UK and around the world. Together, we ensure that bright ideas are supported, scaled and shared, turning ambition into innovation and innovation into impact. We aim to strengthen education, skills and inclusion to inspire and equip the engineers of today and tomorrow.”