The Royal Academy of Engineering is the UK’s national academy of engineering. The Academy brings together the most successful and talented engineers from across the engineering sectors for a shared purpose: to advance and promote excellence in engineering.

The Fellowship was founded in June 1976 with enthusiastic support from HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senior Fellow and continues to fulfil that role to this day. The Fellowship was granted a Royal Charter in 1983 and became The Royal Academy of Engineering in 1992, having been granted a Royal Title. ^[1]

The Royal Fellows of the Academy comprise HRH The Prince Philip, HRH The Duke of Kent and HRH The Princess Royal. ^[2] The Fellowship currently stands at over 1,400 distinguished engineers from across the sectors and disciplines, who lead, guide and contribute to the Academy’s work and provide expertise.^[3] Up to 60 engineers are elected each year by their peers, distinguished by the title 'Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering' and the postnominal designation 'FREng'. Honorary and International Fellows who have made exceptional contributions to engineering are also elected.The current President of the Academy is Sir John Parker FREng. The Immediate Past President is Lord Browne of Madingley.

The Academy’s activities are focused on positioning engineering at the heart of society by:

• encouraging entrepreneurs and innovators to develop ideas, investing in a body of world-class, commercially useful research and the researchers to create it
• shaping national policy as an independent adviser to, and delivery partner of, government
• nurturing engineering education and skills through leadership, policy advice and programmes to enhance teaching and learning
• inspiring young people to become engineers, increasing diversity across the profession and celebrating engineering excellence and innovation
• leading the profession, harnessing the strengths of the engineering institutions and providing the voice of engineering
• recognising great engineering through prizes and awards
• choosing the best engineers to join the Fellowship and supporting them in leading its activities

It is a national Academy with a global outlook and conducts a number of international activities with partners across the world.

The Academy is also an instrumental player in two policy alliances setup in 2009 to provide coherent advice for engineering education and policy across the profession: Education for Engineering(E4E) and Engineering the Future.

Activities of the Academy[link]

1. Driving economic growth[link]

The Academy invests in world class research, supporting the best people and focusing on areas that address specific issues and challenges. It also encourages and builds strong links between academia and industry, opening up opportunities for research to be translated into real world applications, products and services which in turn will generate wealth and jobs.

Academy activities also focus on how the UK can create the right climate in which innovation, entrepreneurship, business and industry can flourish.

Example activities: Engineering enterprise fellowships Post Doctoral Fellowships

2. Foster better education and skills[link]

The Academy works with the engineering profession and other partners to increase the diversity and number of people that study science, technology, engineering and mathematics and focuses on enriching the experience by bringing real-world engineering practice into schools, further education colleges and universities.

The Academy also hosts the professional engineering alliance Education for Engineering (E4E) which provides a unified voice in education debates and advice on all aspects of engineering education policy.

3. Lead the profession[link]

The Academy harnesses the collective pan-engineering expertise of its Fellowship to act as an advisor to the British government by providing recommendations, analysis and solutions on a number of topical policy areas. At present, the Academy’s policy work focuses on energy, infrastructure, transport, sustainability, innovation, education and skills in addition to the issues that concern business and industry and rebalancing the economy.

The Academy is also host to the professional engineering alliance Engineering the Future to provide a unified voice for engineering on matters that require expertise and advice from a number of engineering bodies.

Example activities UK offshore wind supply chain Heat: degrees of comfort

4. Promoting engineering at the heart of society[link]

The Academy organises a number of events and debates in addition to the production of a quarterly magazine Ingenia to reach a variety of difference audiences and enhance greater awareness of engineering and how it impacts on the wider world.

The Academy also recognises and celebrates the most talented engineers by awarding prestigious prizes, including the annual MacRobert Award, Britain’s top prize for engineering innovation.^[4]

The Academy’s public spaces in its building at 3 Carlton House Terrace are currently undergoing renovation works and will be re-opened in spring 2012 to provide a central platform for the UK to become the Forum for engineering engagement, debate, discussion and celebration.^[5]

Carlton House Terrace[link]

The Academy’s premises at 3-4 Carlton House Terrace are housed in a Grade I listed building overlooking St James’ Park, designed by celebrated architect John Nash and owned by the Crown Estates. The Academy shares the Terrace with two of its sister academies, the British Academy and the Royal Society as well as other institutes.

History[link]

Conceived in the late 1960s, during the excitement of the Apollo programme and the buzz of Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’, the Fellowship of Engineering was born in the same year as Concorde’s first commercial flight.^[6]

The Fellowship met for the first time on 11 June 1976 at Buckingham Palace where 126 of the UK’s finest engineers were enrolled, including jet engine genius Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, design guru Sir Ove Arup, radar pioneer Sir George MacFarlane, bouncing bomb inventor Sir Barnes Wallis, father of the UK computer industry, Sir Maurice Wilkes and the Fellowship’s first President, Lord Hinton who had driven the UK’s supremacy in nuclear power.^[7]

The Fellowship focused on championing excellence in all fields of engineering and activities began in earnest in the mid-1970s when the Distinction lecture series, now known as the Hinton lectures, was founded; the Fellowship was asked to advise the Department of Industry for the first time and the Academy became host and presenter of the MacRobert prize.^[8]

In the 1980s, the Fellowship acquired its own Royal Charter, its first government grant-in-aid in addition to significant industrial funding, initiated its research programme to build bridges between academia and industry and opened its doors to International and Honorary Fellows.^[9]

The Academy’s first major education initiative, Engineering Education Continuum began in 1990 and has now evolved into the BEST programme and Tomorrow’s Engineers.

The Academy’s increasing level of influence – both in policy, research and education – was recognised when it was granted a royal title and became The Royal Academy of Engineering in 1992.^[10]

Diversity[link]

The Academy strives to ensure that the pool of candidates for election to The Fellowship better reflects the diverse make-up society within which it exists. It set up the Proactive Membership Committee in 2008 to identify and support the nomination of candidates from a range of underrepresented areas, aiming to boost the number of women candidates, engineers from industry and Small and Medium Enterprises, those from emerging technologies and ethically diverse backgrounds.^[11]

The logo[link]

The Academy’s current logo is inspired by human’s first technological advance: the Neolithic hand-axe, which was taken to be a symbol appropriate to the Academy, representative of the ever-changing relationship between humanity and technology.^[12]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Royal Academy of Engineering website
• Royal Academy of Engineering information
• Engineering Education Scheme (England) website
• Headstart website
• Year in Industry website
• Engineering Leadership Awards website
• Ingenia magazine website

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Robert James Mair CBE FREng FICE FRS is a British geotechnologist. He was appointed Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Cambridge University in 1998, succeeding Andrew Noel Schofield. He was Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge from 1998 to 2001, when he became Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007. Robert is the son of the late William Austyn Mair, Francis Mond Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Cambridge 1952-1983. He delivered the 46th Rankine Lecture of the British Geotechnical Association.

Mair was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2010 New Year Honours.^[1]

Footnotes[link]

External links[link]

• http://www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk/125/now/rjm.html
• http://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/contacts/master.html
• http://www-civ.eng.cam.ac.uk/geotech_new/people/mair/mair.html

This biographical article about a British geologist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (August 2011)

Dr Martyn Thomas CBE FREng FBCS FIET FRSA (born 1948) is a British independent consultant and software engineer. He founded the software engineering company Praxis in 1983, based in Bath, southern England. He has a special interest in safety-critical systems and other high integrity applications. He has acted as an expert witness involving complex software engineering issues.

Thomas was born in Salisbury, England. He studied biochemistry at University College London, graduating in 1969, when he started working in the field of computing. Between 1969 and 1983, he was employed at universities in London and the Netherlands, at STC working on telecommunications software, and at the South West Universities Regional Computer Centre in Bath.

In 1983, Thomas founded Praxis with David Bean, where he encouraged the use of formal methods within the company for software development. In 1986 Praxis became the first independent systems house to achieve BS 5750 (later ISO 9001) certification for all its activities. Praxis became internationally recognised as a leader in the use of rigorous software engineering, including formal methods, and grew to around 200 staff.

In December 1992, Praxis was sold to Deloitte and Touche, an international firm of accountants and management consultants, and Martyn became a Deloitte Consulting international partner whilst remaining Chairman and, later, Managing Director of Praxis. He left Deloitte Consulting in 1997.

He is currently director of Martyn Thomas Associates Limited and a visiting professor at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, and the University of Bristol. He lives in London.

Current career[link]

Non-Executive Director at the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL),
Non-Executive Director at a UK Government Agency,
Chair of the IT Policy Panel at IET,
Non-Executive Director at Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIAHE),
Member at Defence Scientific Advisory Council,
Fellow at The Royal Academy of Engineering,
Member at UK Computing Research Committee,
Owner, Principal Consultant and Expert Witness at MTAL.

Past career[link]

Visiting Professor of Software Engineering at Oxford University, UK,
Member of Advisory Council at Foundation for Information Policy Research,
Fellow at British Computer Society,
Chair, Executive Board at DEPLOY Project,
Member, "Sufficient Evidence" study at National Academies / CSTB,
Chair, Steering Committee at DIRC,
Member of Council at EPSRC,
Member of Advisory Group at OST Foresight programmes,
Partner at Deloitte Consulting,
Founder/Chairman/Managing Director at Praxis,
Chairman at Praxis Critical Systems,
Deputy Director at SWURCC,
Software Engineer at STC.

Honors and Awards[link]

Commander of the Order of the British Empire, CBE,
Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, FREng
Honorary DSc (Hull),
Honorary DSc (Edinburgh),
Honorary DSc (City),
IEE Achievement Medal,
Computing and Control,
Who's Who.

External links[link]

• Martyn Thomas Associates Limited website
• Martyn Thomas linkedin
• Martyn Thomas biography from the IET
• Oxford University Computing Laboratory home page
• List of publications from the DBLP Bibliography Server.

Inger Christensen (16 January 1935 – 2 January 2009) was a Danish poet, novelist, essayist and editor considered the foremost Danish poetic experimentalist of her generation.

Life and work[link]

Born in the town of Vejle, on the eastern, Jutland coast of Denmark, Christensen's father was a tailor, her mother a cook before her marriage. After graduating from Vejle Gymnasium, she moved to Copenhagen and, later, to Århus, studying at the Teachers’ College there. She received her certificate in 1958. During this same period, Christensen began publishing poems in the journal Hvedekorn, and was guided by the noted Danish poet and critic Poul Borum (1934–1995), whom she married in 1959 and divorced in 1976.^[1]

After teaching at the College for Arts in Holbæk from 1963 to 1964, she turned to writing full time, producing two of her major early collections, Lys (Light, 1962) and Græs (Grass, 1963), both examining the limits of self-knowledge and the role of language in perception. Her most acclaimed work of the 1960s, however, was It (det), which, on one level, explored social, political and aesthetic issues, but more deeply probed large philosophical questions of meaning. The work, almost incantatory in tone, opposes issues such as fear and love and power and powerlessness.^[1]

In these years Christensen also published two novels, Evighedsmaskinen (1964) and Azorno (1967), as well as a shorter fiction on the Italian Renaissance painter Mantegna, presented from the viewpoint of various narrators (Mantegna's secretary Marsilio, the Turkish princess Farfalla, and Mantagena's young son), Det malede Værelse (1976, translated into English as The Painted Room by Harvill Press in 2000).

Much of Christensen's work was organized upon “systemic” structures in accordance with her belief that poetry is not truth and not even the “dream” of truth, but “is a game, maybe a tragic game—the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us.”

In the 1981 poetry collection Alfabet, Christensen used the alphabet (from a ["apricots"] to n ["nights"]) along with the Fibonacci mathematical sequence in which the next number is the sum of the two previous ones (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…). As she explained: "The numerical ratios exist in nature: the way a leek wraps around itself from the inside, and the head of a snowflower, are both based on this series." Her system ends on the n, suggesting many possible meanings including “n’s” significance as any whole number. As with It, however, despite its highly structured elements this work is a poetically evocative series concerned with oppositions such as an outpouring of the joy of the world counterposed with the fears for and forces poised for its destruction.

Sommerfugledalen of 1991 (Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, 2004) explores through the sonnet structure the fragility of life and mortality, ending in a kind of transformation.

Christensen also wrote works for children, plays, radio pieces, and numerous essays, the most notable of which were collected in her book Hemmelighedstilstanden (The State of Secrecy) in 2000.

Awards and honors[link]

In 1978, she was appointed to the Royal Danish Academy; in 1994, she became a member of the Académie Européenne de Poésie ("European Academy of Poetry");^[2] in 2001, the Akademie der Künste ("Academy of the Arts") in Berlin.^[3] She won the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poésie in 1991; Der österreichische Staatspreis für Literature ("Austrian State Prize for European Literature") in 1994; in 1994, she won the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, known as the 'little Nobel'; the European Poetry Prize in 1995; The America Award in 2001;^[2] the German Siegfried Unseld award in 2006;^[4] and received numerous other distinctions. Her works have been translated into several languages, and she was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.^[2]

Works[link]

Years link to corresponding "[year] in poetry" article for books of poems, or "[year] in literature" for other literary works:

• 1962: Lys: digte ("Light"), poems^[5]
• 1963: Græs: digte ("Grass"), poems^[5]
• 1964: Evighedsmaskinen, ("Eternity Machine"), novel^[5]
• 1967: Azorno, novel (translated into English by Denise Newman; New Directions, 2009)^[5]
• 1969: det, ("it"), poems 1969 (translated into English by Susanna Nied)^[5]
• 1972: Intriganterne ("The Scheming"), play^[5]
• 1976: Det malede værelse ("The Painted Room: A Tale of Mantua"), novel (translated into English by Denise Newman; Harvill Press, 2000)^[5]
• 1979: Brev i april ("Letter in April"), poems^[5]
• 1979: Den historie der skal fortælles^[5]
• 1981: Alfabet, 1981 - "Alphabet", poems (translated into English by Susanna Nied), twice translated into Swedish^[5]
• 1982: Del af labyrinten^[5] ("Part of the Maze"), essays
• 1982: Den store ukendte rejse^[5] ("The Big Unknown Journey"), children's book
• 1987: En vinteraften i Ufa og andre spil ("A Winter Evening in Ufa"), plays^[5]
• 1989: Digt om døden ("Poem on Death")
• 1989: Lys og Græs^[5] ("Light and Grass"), poetry
• 1990: Mikkel og hele menageriet (illustrated by Lillian Brøgger)^[5] children's book
• 1991: Sommerfugledalen, ("Butterfly Valley: A Requiem"), poems (translated into English by Susanna Nied)^[5]
• 1998: Samlede digte ("Collected Poems")^[5]
• 2000: Hemmelighedstilstanden ("The State of Secrecy"), essays^[5]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Biography including selected works
• Poem of Christensen painted on a wall in Copenhagen
• Obituary in The Independent by Marcus Williamson