2018 Higginson Lecture

	Title of The Talk
	From Silent Aircraft to Noisy Engineers
	Guest Speaker
	Professor Dame Ann Dowling OM FREng FRS President of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Cambridge
	Event Sponsors:
	Institution of Engineering & Technology Institution of Mechanical Engineers

Abstract:

In this talk, Ann summarised her research at the interface of academia and business and discuss how the lessons she learnt through it have influenced her priorities as President of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering. These include the vital importance of the interface between academia and business and the huge contribution better models of collaboration can make to the outcome of joint research; the role that grand challenges can play as drivers of transformative research; the need for more and better international research co-operation to meet our shared challenges; the requirement for engineers to do more to showcase the impact of their work; and the strong conviction that anyone, no matter what their gender, social or ethnic background, should be able to follow their passion into an engineering career.

Speaker Bio

As a student, Ann Dowling was inspired to a career in engineering and aeroacoustics by a then topical problem of the noise generated by Concorde, the British/French supersonic passenger aircraft. Her research opened the door to collaborations with the UK defence agency on improving the signal-to-noise ratio of submarines’ sonar systems, with car and tyre manufacturers on tyre-road interaction, and with Rolls-Royce and the power industry on low emission combustion and active and adaptive combustion control. She came back to aeroacoustics to lead the Silent Aircraft Initiative, a large-scale collaborative project between Cambridge and MIT with an ambitious goal and an innovative organisational structure, which has developed a concept aircraft which could take 215 passengers from London to Los Angeles with less fuel and significantly reduced noise levels.