Anne Neville (engineer)

Anne Neville grew up in Dumfries with her older sister Linda. Their mother Doris worked as a pharmacy technician and their father Bill was a process worker at ICI Dumfries. Her uncle is Professor Robert Black, Emeritus Professor of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh. Anne attended Maxwellton High School where her interest in maths and physics grew. Anne was also a good badminton player and played the trumpet.^[6]

Anne Neville was educated at Maxwelltown High School^[3] in Dumfries and was unsure what she should do at university, at one point considered becoming a social worker. She went into engineering by accident. The Glasgow University prospectus fell open at the page with a Rolls-Royce gas turbine picture and she thought it looked interesting. Anne Neville's maths teacher was a mechanical engineer and he inspired her to investigate further. After visiting the university open days, Anne Neville decided that she wanted to study engineering and rejected her earlier initial thoughts of either studying maths or physics.^[7]

Anne Neville began her studies at the University of Glasgow in 1988 and she graduated in 1992 with a First Class Honours BEng degree followed by PhD in mechanical engineering in 1995.^[2][1] As part of her PhD, she conducted an experimental study of corrosion and tribocorrosion processes on high alloy stainless steels and Ni-alloys and her work led to an increased understanding of the synergies that exist between corrosion and wear processes.^[2]

Anne Neville was a mechanical engineer with a specific interest in corrosion, tribology and processes that occur at engineering interfaces. She was appointed a lecturer at Heriot-Watt University immediately after her PhD and started to build a research team.

Anne Neville's contributions were manifold, across lubrication and wear, mineral scaling and tribo-corrosion, with applications in diverse fields such as the oil and gas sector, wind energy and tribo-corrosion and surgical technologies. In particular, her group were the first to measure corrosion rates in-situ in hip joint simulators which made important contributions to the work associated with the controversies associated with metal-on-metal hip implants. In 2009 and 2013 Anne's work was used to guide the medical health authorities in the UK on what to do with a hip prostheses that had shown unacceptably high failure rates in patients. They used advanced microscopy x-ray spectroscopy to understand how surfaces are lubricated in industrial and medical components.^[7]

Her research team grew to 25 researchers in the following years during her time at Heriot Watt University and in 1999 she was promoted to Reader and then Professor in 2002.^[8]

Anne Neville and her group moved to Leeds in 2003 where she founded and was the Director of the Institute of Functional Surfaces (iFS) which comprised 70 researchers. The institute had a £10 million funding portfolio that spanned many agencies and industrial sectors including medical, oil and gas and automotive.

Her research group was the first to measure corrosion rates in-situ in hip joint simulators. This was very important in the most recent controversies around metal-on-metal implants. Anne Neville's publications were numerous, widely relied upon, and she published nearly 700 peer-reviewed articles during her career, with more than 11,000 citations.^[7]

Neville retired from her Leeds chair in 2020, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer.^[9][10]