A world authority on combustion and acoustics, Ann Dowling was the first woman to hold the role of Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cambridge and went on to become Deputy Vice Chancellor of the university.
After working at Rolls-Royce in Bristol, she was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Cambridge in 1979 and held visiting research posts at MIT in 1999 and Caltech in 2001. She was Head of the Department of Engineering at Cambridge from 2009 to 2014.
In 2002, she was recognised in HM The Queen's Birthday Honours, receiving a CBE for services to mechanical engineering, and again in the 2007 New Year's Honours list when she received a DBE for services to science. In the 2016 New Year's Honours, she was admitted to the Order of Merit, the first woman engineer to be appointed.
After a degree in mathematics Dame Ann completed a PhD in engineering with Professor John Ffowcs Williams FREng, who led pioneering noise-reduction research on Concorde. Dame Ann later led the Cambridge MIT Silent Aircraft project, which published a radical new design concept SAX-40 in 2006 with the aim of raising aircraft industry aspirations. She went on to lead research on efficient, low-emission combustion for aero and industrial gas turbines and low-noise vehicles, particularly aircraft.
Her work in aeronautics and energy has been recognised by fellowships of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, as well as foreign associate membership of both the US National Academy of Engineering and the French Academy of Sciences. Dame Ann was awarded the James Watt International Gold Medal by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 2016 and has received honorary degrees from 15 universities including Oxford, Imperial College London and KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm.
In 2004, she chaired a widely respected report produced jointly by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties, which highlighted the need for responsible regulation and research around the use of materials at an extremely small scale. The government-commissioned Dowling Review into business–university research collaborations was published in 2015.
Dame Ann is a Non-Executive Director of BP, a non-executive member of the board of BEIS, and a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology.
Dame Ann Dowling