Professor Rebecca Shipley named Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering

UCL Mechanical Engineering Professor of Healthcare Engineering Rebecca Shipley (OBE FREng FIET) has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Professor Shipley is an internationally recognised research leader in computational modelling in healthcare.  A mathematician by training, she has pioneered model-based techniques to better understand how diseased and damaged tissues function and repair, including in cancer and nerve injury, as well as data-driven models in physiology. She is a passionate advocate for healthcare engineering and the translation of scientific discoveries into practice.

On the announcement of her Fellowship Professor Shipley said:

“I am honoured to be elected as a Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering. The Academy is leading the charge on tackling some of the most important challenges in our society. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to continue collaborating with them as a Fellow, particularly at the intersection of engineering, computing and health.”

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“I am overjoyed with the announcement that Becky Shipley has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.  It is the highest honour of distinction and well deserved for Becky’s amazing world leading engineering science in the field of healthcare, which has had real measurable impact including saving lives through the pandemic.  My sincere congratulations! Thank you for your inspiring contributions to our department over the years.”

Her new Fellowship is the latest of a sequence of honours and acknowledgements for Shipley, including a portrait in London’s Science Museum, partially prompted by her efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

During the pandemic, Shipley co-led the UCL-Ventura programme with Professor Tim Baker in partnership with Mercedes AMG, clinicians from UCLH and others, to reverse engineer, manufacture and deliver some 10,000 non-invasive ventilators to the NHS in the UK and beyond. The UCL Ventura team then won the Royal Academy of Engineering’s President’s Special Award for Pandemic Services. The initiative also contributed to Shipley being awarded an Order of British Empire (OBE) in the late Queen’s 2021 Birthday Honours.

Named an engineering icon in the Royal Academy’s celebratory tube map, Shipley led the UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering and served as Vice-Provost Healthcare for UCL’s Faculty of Engineering between 2018 and 2024. Alongside her academic role at UCL Mechanical Engineering she now serves as Chief Research Officer at UCL Partners. 

In congratulating the Royal Academy of Engineering’s latest Fellowships, a bumper crop of 71 stellar engineers including Shipley, academy President Dr John Lazar CBE FREng, said:

“Our new Fellows represent some of the most talented people in the world of engineering and are taken from the ranks of those who are aiming to address some of our most critical problems.

We are proud to say that many of our newly elected Fellows have come from underrepresented groups in engineering and related sectors and we hope this helps to tackle some of the issues around a lack of diversity within the profession.

There is ample evidence that a wider pool of ideas and experiences helps to improve decision-making and develop novel solutions to global challenges.”

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