New President Appointed for The Welding Institute

Professor Dame Julia King, Baroness Brown of Cambridge DBE FREng FRS, has been appointed as the new President of The Welding Institute.

Appointed by The Welding Institute Council on 28 September 2022, Baroness Brown is the first female president appointed since the formation of The Institute nearly one hundred years ago back in 1923.

Baroness Brown is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, as well as being a crossbench member of the House of Lords, where she chairs the Science and Technology Select Committee. She is also the current chair of the Carbon Trust, STEM Learning Ltd and the Adaptation Committee of the Climate Change Committee. In addition, the baroness is a non-executive director of Ørsted, Ceres Power and Frontier IP, as well as having been the inaugural chair of the Henry Royce Institute for Advanced Materials (until January 2022).

Having graduated from the University of Cambridge with an MA in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Fracture Mechanics, her previous roles include a decade spent as the Vice-Chancellor of Aston University, serving as the Principal of the Engineering Faculty at Imperial College, London, and a series of senior business and engineering posts at Rolls-Royce plc.

Baroness Brown has published over 160 papers on fatigue and fracture in structural materials and on developments in aerospace and marine propulsion technologies. She was awarded the Grunfeld, John Collier, Lunar Society, Constance Tipper, Bengough, Kelvin and Leonardo da Vinci medals as well as the Erna Hamburger Prize and the 2012 President's Prize of the Engineering Professors' Council.

In addition, she is the holder of 10 honorary degrees and is an honorary Fellow of IoMMM, IET, the British Science Association, the Energy Institute and the Society for the Environment.

Julia King was announced as a life peer in the House of Lords on 13 October 2015 by the House of Lords Appointments Commission, with her title officially gazetted as Baroness Brown of Cambridge on 30 October 2015.

Speaking on the appointment, TWI CEO Aamir Khalid said, “We are delighted to welcome Baroness Brown as the new President of The Welding Institute, where her wealth of experience and standing in the industrial community speaks for itself.”