The Deputy Master, Professor Philip Thomas, was made an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Measurement and Control at a ceremony held in at Prince Philip House, London on 26 October. Honorary Fellowship is given in recognition of distinguished, and normally long, service to the Institute and/or measurement and control.
The award marks Philip’s 45 years as a Chartered Measurement and Control Technologist, many of which were spent serving the Institute’s on its national committees – he was elected a Member in1978, while he was working for ICI plc, on Teesside, and he was invited to join the Institute’s Systems and Control Technology Panel a year later.
He was elected a Fellow in 1990 and became President of the Institute in 2001. He continued to serve the Institute thereafter, first as Past President, then Deputy Honorary Secretary and finally as Honorary Treasurer, before finally stepping down in 2013.
His work advancing the art of measurement and control was honoured with the InstMC’s Honeywell International Medal in 2004. He was awarded the Institute’s ICI Prize three times and the Institute bestowed on him the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers Prize for writing the best paper in the InstMC’s “Measurement + Control’ journal in 2006.
The Awards Ceremony also saw InstMC President, Prof. Sheila Smith, presenting Dr Gregor Brown of Sensia Global with the Livery’s Cornish Award. This prize is given to an individual, group or company that has excelled in some dimension of scientific instrument making within industry, academia, or national or international laboratories.
The Sir Harold Hartley Award for an outstanding contribution to the technology of measurement and control was given to Professor Martin Dawson, Director of the Fraunhofer Centre for Applied Photonics. Livery members may remember that Prof. Dawson presented this year’s Edwards Lecture, organised jointly by WCSIM, Edwards High Vacuum and City, University of London.