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Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge
Professor Dame Ann Dowling is currently a Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of Mechanical Engineering. She was President of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2014-19, Head of the Department of Engineering at Cambridge 2009-14, and has held visiting posts at MIT (Jerome C Hunsaker Visiting Professor, 1999) and at Caltech (Moore Distinguished Scholar 2001).
Dame 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. Dame 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 20 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 a non-executive 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 was appointed to the Order of Merit by the Queen in December 2015.
Professor Dowling's research is primarily in the fields of combustion, acoustics and vibration and is aimed at low-emission combustion and quiet vehicles. She is one of the founders of the Energy Efficient Cities initiative in Cambridge and was the UK lead of the Silent Aircraft Initiative, a collaboration between researchers at Cambridge and MIT.
