04 June 2003

More than cosmetic innovation wins Leeds Professor an Academy Award

Richard Williams FREng, Anglo America plc Professor of Mineral and Process Engineering at the University of Leeds, has won a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for product innovation and impact on personal products and process engineering industries. He has founded three companies to exploit his research into how tiny particles behave in manufacturing processes - which helps in making cosmetics, toothpaste and pharmaceutical products. Professor Williams will receive his medal at the Academy Awards Dinner in London on Thursday 5 June.

While maintaining his academic roots, Professor Williams is committed to ensuring that inventions can be translated into practical innovation-based businesses to benefit industrial manufacturing practice. His latest venture, started this year, is a company called Structure Vision Ltd, jointly owned by the University of Leeds. It sells services and a software product, DigiPac, with applications from packaging and pharmaceuticals to road-building.

Professor Williams founded his first company, now floated as Disperse Technologies plc, as a one-man band in 1995 when he was Professor of Minerals Engineering at Exeter University. The company licensed new ideas in particle technology to manufacturers of various personal and household products from moisturising cream to polishes and cleaning products. Several leading-brand products have adopted Disperse's technology and are now sold worldwide. The business is now based in both the UK and US and is growing fast with turnover exceeding £1 million - and this year so far reporting income up by 55 per cent - despite the fall in the US dollar.

Acknowledged as a leader in his field, Professor Williams has led several industrial projects linking academia and industry, including the Virtual Centre for Industrial Process Tomography, of which he is Research Director. "Tomography is a way of seeing inside a fast-moving chemical process," he says, "doctors use similar techniques in the form of a CAT scanner to see inside people and observe any malfunction. The UK leads the world in developing industrialised versions of these scanners but using electrical sensors to inspect manufacturing processes."

Process tomography is in such demand from industry that in 1997 Professor Williams started another company, Industrial Tomography Systems Ltd, as a joint venture between the inventors and UMIST. This later formed the Optomo plc Group with new shareholders, including Leeds and Exeter Universities. Based in Manchester, this small company has blue-chip clients all over the world who can now visualise and monitor their chemical processes. "It's also ideal for detecting foreign objects like glass, stones or splinters of wood in processed foods," he says.

Elected to the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2000, Professor Williams also held an Academy Research Chair, jointly sponsored by Rio Tinto plc, at the University of Exeter from 1993 to 1998.

ends

Notes for editors

1. The Academy's Silver Medals, instigated in 1995, are awarded annually to engineers aged 50 or under who have made outstanding contributions to British engineering. Only four awards may be made each year.
   
   
2. This year's other Silver Medals go to Andy Hopper FREng, Professor of Communication Engineering at Cambridge University; Stephen Furber FREng FRS, ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester; Dr Ian Mays, Managing Director of Renewable Energy Systems in St Albans.
   
   
3. The Royal Academy of Engineering brings together the UK's most eminent engineers from all disciplines. They use their unrivalled knowledge and experience for the public good, giving independent advice to Government, supporting engineering education and research and encouraging excellence and innovation.
   

For more information please contact:

Lize King at the Royal Academy of Engineering

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