Huddersfield's Royal Academy Fellow
Thu, 19 Jul 2012 08:59:00 BST
Professor Xiangqian Jiang elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
Pictured with Professor Jiang are the University's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bob Cryan (left), and Chancellor, Sir Patrick Stewart (right).
The University is delighted to announce that Professor Xiangqian Jiang, the Director of UK EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Advanced Metrology, has been elected as Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
The Royal Academy is the UK’s national academy for engineering and its mission is to bring together the most successful and talented engineers from across the engineering sectors for a shared purpose of ‘advancing and promoting excellence in engineering’.
The fellowships are a major part of this process and are only awarded to a select few engineers who have attained the highest possible distinctions and success in their career.
Professor Jiang, who is known to her colleagues as Jane, holds the University’s Chair of Precision Metrology and is the Director of UK EPSRC Centre, a major new £8 million research facility at the University of Huddersfield. Jane’s research centres on the development of mathematical models and algorithms for surface metrology and development of new optical interferometry techniques for measurement of micro/nano-scale surface topography and form geometry.
Praise has come from all quarters to Professor Jiang and in particular from the University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bob Cryan, who is himself an engineer: “This is the highest possible distinction an engineer can attain in their career and it is only right that a truly brilliant engineer and researcher as Jane should be elected to Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.”
“Jane’s continuing achievements in the EPSRC Centre are a credit to both her and the University and, on a personal level, make me extremely proud. In the field of advanced metrology, the Centre is the only one of its kind in the country and one of only three across the whole of Europe. I am delighted that Jane will be leading the Centre as our University extends its research in both engineering and science.”
A glittering and distinguished career
Professor Jiang’s election as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering is the latest accolade in what is a glittering and distinguished career.
In 1999, Professor Jiang was awarded the title ‘Chinese Research Student of the Decade in Engineering’ by the Chinese Government for her doctoral dissertation.
In 2006, she became the first-ever researcher from the ‘new university’ sector to receive the prestigious Royal Society ‘Wolfson Research Merit Award’ and in the same year Professor Jiang was voted the Asian Woman of Achievement Award.
Professor Jiang has published over 230 papers and author/co-authored eight books on measurement science and surface metrology. She has been awarded over £12 million in research funds as a principal investigator and currently holds the highly-prestigious award of Frontier Research Grant (Advance Investigator Scheme) sponsored by the European Research Council.
As well as being a new Fellow of Royal Academy of Engineering Professor Jiang is also a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering Technology, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce (RSA) and a Fellow of the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP). In 2006, Professor Jiang was presented to the Queen as one of the “People who have made a significant contribution to national life” at a Buckingham Palace.
China’s best PhD dissertation in engineering
Professor Jiang has been pushing back frontiers throughout her life and career. Although she was forced to leave school aged just 15 and work on an assembly line during the period of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, she studied with fierce dedication to achieve her dream of becoming an engineer.
Eventually she was adjudged to have written China’s best PhD dissertation in engineering - her paper became a model of its type, studied at all Chinese universities.
At the age of 38 she arrived in Britain, working as a research engineer at Birmingham University before coming to Huddersfield, where the Centre for Precision Technologies is acknowledged as a UK and European leader in the field.
Appointed professor in 2003, Professor Jiang delivered an inaugural public lecture entitled ‘The Mystery of Surfaces’ in which she explained her deep fascination for a subject which, she said, “are at the heart of living systems and all moving objects”.
