Department of Engineering / News / Professor Phil Woodland elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering

Department of Engineering

Professor Phil Woodland elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering

Professor Phil Woodland elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering

Professor Philip Woodland FREng

Congratulations to Professor Phil Woodland on being elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. 

I am delighted to welcome to our Fellowship 50 more of today’s very best engineering minds. From life-changing equipment revolutionising our hospitals to new tools that are enabling high-tech businesses to flourish, their work has delivered great value to society.

Professor Dame Ann Dowling OM DBE FREng FRS, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering

Phil Woodland, Professor of Information Engineering, University of Cambridge has carried out pioneering work in the development of large vocabulary speech recognition, both in academia and industry. His contributions include the invention of a technique for adapting recognisers automatically to different speakers and the development of a framework for discriminatively training acoustic models to minimise errors. Both are widely used in today’s commercial speech recognition systems.

The Royal Academy of Engineering welcomed 50 of the UK’s finest engineers as new Fellows following its 40th annual general meeting.

Renowned engineers from across the country are elected to the Academy in recognition of their outstanding and continuing contributions to the profession. 

Professor Dame Ann Dowling OM DBE FREng FRS, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: “For 40 years the Academy has gathered the wisdom, ingenuity and expertise of the nation’s finest engineers to advance and promote excellence in the profession. I am delighted to welcome to our Fellowship 50 more of today’s very best engineering minds. From life-changing equipment revolutionising our hospitals to new tools that are enabling high-tech businesses to flourish, their work has delivered great value to society. We are very much looking forward to working with all our new Fellows as we continue to make the UK a leading nation for engineering innovation.”

The first meeting of the Fellowship of Engineering took place on 11 June 1976, when 130 leading engineers of the day including jet engine visionary Sir Frank Whittle, design guru Sir Ove Arup, and father of the UK computer industry Sir Maurice Wilkes were invited to Buckingham Palace by Senior Fellow HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Leading engineers have been elected to the Fellowship – later to become the Royal Academy of Engineering – every year since, and it now consists of around 1,500 engineers from across engineering disciplines in both industry and academia.

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