It is with great sadness that the Engineering Professors’ Council marks the passing of Professor Clive Neal-Sturgess, a longstanding friend, colleague and contributor to the EPC and to the wider engineering academic community.
Clive’s association with the EPC spanned many years and many different aspects of our work. He served on the EPC Board and made a particularly sustained contribution to the EPC’s work on engineering education, employability and skills. He chaired the EPC’s EES working group and remained an active member of the Education, Employability and Skills Committee many years later, continuing to bring his experience and perspective to its discussions.
Clive was also closely involved in the EPC’s disciplinary communities. He served as Chairman of Academics in Mechanical Engineering (AiME), the EPC sectoral group that developed from PHOMME, the longstanding community for Professors and Heads of Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering. In explaining the transition to AiME, Clive was keen that the community should become broader and more inclusive, reflecting the EPC’s development from an organisation associated principally with professors and heads towards today’s wider Engineering Academics Network.
That breadth of engagement was characteristic of Clive’s contribution to the EPC. He brought to discussions not simply his knowledge of mechanical engineering, but a longstanding interest in the bigger questions facing engineering higher education. His work with EES included engagement with internationalisation and the development of engineering education, and his continued participation in the Committee meant that his experience remained available to subsequent generations of EPC colleagues.
For the EPC, Clive was one of those people whose contribution cannot adequately be represented simply by a list of committees and positions. His long service connected different periods in the organisation’s history, from its more traditional disciplinary and heads-of-department networks through to the much broader community of engineering academics that the EPC represents today. His involvement with the Board, EES and AiME reflected a sustained commitment to that community and to engineering education.
We are enormously grateful for everything Clive gave to the EPC and to engineering higher education over so many years. He will be greatly missed by colleagues and friends across our community, and we extend our deepest sympathies to his family, friends and all those who worked alongside him.
Invitation to colleagues
We invite colleagues and friends to share their memories and tributes to Clive in the comments below.
