Announcements

Professor Chris Toumazou is to be appointed as the College’s first Regius Professor of Engineering.

Imperial College London was granted a prestigious Regius professorship by Her Majesty the Queen as part of her 60th anniversary celebrations. Eleven other universities in the UK also received the rare privilege of using the Regius title, awarded only twice in the past century.  The award is a reflection of the exceptionally high quality of teaching and research at an institution and prior to these awards, regius professorships were limited to a handful of the ancient universities of the UK and Ireland – Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Trinity College, Dublin.

Imperial College will confer the title of Regius Professor of Engineering on Professor Chris Toumazou FRS, FREng, FMedSci from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering as part of the Commemoration Day Ceremony on Wednesday 23 October 2013.

Among his many achievements, Professor Toumazou developed one of the world’s first cochlear implants to enable deaf people to hear. He has also created a digital plaster, which can remotely monitor a patient’s medical vital signs in the comfort of their own home and a hand-held genetic sequencing device that can instantly analyse a patients DNA to determine if that patient can metabolise a specific type of medication.

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Professor Sir Mark Walport FRS has accepted appointment as an Honorary Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Imperial College.

The appointment is for the duration of Sir Mark’s appointment as the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser.

Sir Mark Walport had been the Director of the Wellcome Trust since 2003, and before that he was Professor of Medicine and Head of the Division of Medicine at the College, where he led a research team that focused on the immunology and genetics of rheumatic diseases.  He originally studied medicine at the University of Cambridge, completing his PhD on complement receptors under the supervision of Peter Lachmann in 1986.  He was knighted in the 2009 New Year Honours list for services to medical research and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011.  In April this year he succeeded Professor Sir John Beddington as the Government Chief Scientific Adviser.

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