Professor Dame Ann Dowling

Professor of Engineering Fellow, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Ann Dowling is President of the Royal Academy of Engineering and is also Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where she was Head of the Department of Engineering 2009-14 and ran the University Gas Turbine Partnership with Rolls-Royce 2001-14. Professor Dowling’s research is on efficient, low emission combustion for aero and industrial gas turbines and low noise vehicles, especially aircraft and cars.

Ann read Mathematics at Girton College, Cambridge, which was followed by a PhD in Engineering, also at Cambridge. She was appointed as Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College in 1977, where she continued as a Fellow after being appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Engineering in 1978. She has held visiting posts at MIT (Jerome C Hunsaker Visiting Professor 1999-2000) and at Caltech (Gordon Moore Distinguished Scholar 2001-2002).

Ann is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering and is a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and of the French Academy of Sciences. She is an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Institution of Engineering Designers, and has honorary degrees from Oxford University, Imperial College London, Trinity College Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast, the Universities of Leeds, Kent and Heriot-Watt, London South Bank University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Ann has served on a number of industry and government advisory committees. She is a non-executive director of BP plc and chairs their Remuneration and Technical Advisory Committees. She is also a non-executive member of the Board of the UK Government’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). She is a member of the Prime-Minister’s Council for Science and Technology and chaired the Physical Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering Panel in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 - the UK Government’s review of research in universities.

Ann was appointed CBE by the Queen for services to Mechanical Engineering in 2002, and DBE for services to Science in 2007.