(Emeritus) Professor Stephen Richardson CBE FREng FIChemE

Nominated by Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE)

Stephen Richardson was, until he retired at the end of 2015, Associate Provost (Institutional Affairs) & Professor of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College.  

He was educated at Imperial College: after working as a Research Assistant at Cambridge, he was appointed as a Lecturer at Imperial College in 1978 and then promoted through the ranks to Professor in 1994. His principal research interest is safety, specifically the depressurisation of vessels and pipelines, particularly those associated with oil and gas production, and development of the computer program BLOWDOWN, which has since been used in the design of well over 300 installations.  

In 1996, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and, in 2015, he was awarded a CBE for services to chemical engineering education and safety. He was President of the Institution of Chemical Engineers between 2019 and 2021 and has been Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Chemical Engineers Benevolent Fund since 2023.

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