Professor Dame Ann Dowling

Ann was President of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2014-19, a  Deputy Vice-Chancellor 2015-25 and was previously Head of the Department of Engineering at Cambridge and Director of the University Gas Turbine Partnership with Rolls-Royce. She has held visiting posts at MIT (Jerome C Hunsaker Visiting Professor, 1999) and at Caltech (Moore Distinguished Scholar 2001).  

Ann's research interests have been primarily in the fields of combustion, acoustics and vibration and aimed, in particular, at low-emission combustion and quiet vehicles. She was the UK lead of the Silent Aircraft Initiative, a collaboration between researchers at Cambridge and MIT who released the conceptual design of an ultra-low noise and fuel efficient aircraft, SAX40. She is currently Chairman of the Isaac Newton Trust, Senior Non-Executive Director of the Smiths Group plc and a Commissioner of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.

Ann is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering and is a Foreign Member of the US and Chinese National Academies of Engineering and of the French Academy of Sciences. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Institution of Engineering Designers and the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and of the Institute of Acoustics. Ann was awarded the James Watt International Gold Medal by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 2016, and the Royal Medal by the Royal Society in 2019. She has an Honorary Doctorates from 21 universities including Oxford University, Imperial College London, Trinity College Dublin, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm and McGill University Canada. 

Ann has served on a number industry and government advisory committees. She is the Senior Independent Director  of the Smiths Group plc. She was a non-executive director of bp plc (2012-21) and a non-executive member of the board of the UK government's Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) 2014-16 and of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) 2017-18. She was a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology (2014-19). In 2015 she chaired a review for BIS on business-university research collaborations.

Ann was appointed CBE for services to Mechanical Engineering in 2002, DBE for services to Science in 2007, and in 2015 was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II to be one of the 24 members of the Order of Merit.