Alison Noble | |
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Born | Nottingham, England | 28 January 1965
Education | Maidstone Grammar School for Girls |
Alma mater | University of Oxford (BA, DPhil) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions |
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Thesis | Descriptions of image surfaces (1989) |
Doctoral advisor | J. Michael Brady [5] [6] |
Website | ibme |
Julia Alison Noble (born 28 January 1965) is a British engineer. She has been Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Hilda's College [2] [1] [7] [8] since 2011, and Associate Head of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at the university. As of 2017 [update] , she is the chief technology officer of Intelligent Ultrasound Limited, [3] an Oxford spin-off in medical imaging [4] that she cofounded. She was director of the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME) from 2012 to 2016. [3] [9] In 2023 she became the Foreign Secretary of The Royal Society (jointly with Mark Walport). [10]
Julia Alison Noble was born on 28 January 1965 in Nottingham, England, to James Bryan Noble and Patricia Ann Noble. [2] She was educated at Maidstone Grammar School for Girls [11] in Kent and was an undergraduate student at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she was awarded a first-class [2] Bachelor of Arts degree in Engineering Science in 1986 followed by a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1989 for research on computer vision and image segmentation supervised by J. Michael Brady. [5] [6] [12]
Noble started her career as a research scientist at the General Electric Corporate R&D Center in Schenectady, New York, where she worked from 1989 to 1994 on developing inspection systems for aircraft engines. [2] [13] [14] She returned to the University of Oxford as a lecturer in 1995 to work on medical applications of computer vision [14] and was promoted to Professor in 2001, [2] as the first female Statutory Professor in Engineering at Oxford. [15]
Noble has made contributions to medical image computing, where her research interests combine knowledge of medical imaging and computational science to support decision-making in clinical medicine. [1] [16] Her research has advanced understanding of automatic extraction of clinically useful information from medical ultrasound scans and developed machine learning solutions to key problems in biomedical image analysis. [17] [18] [19] [20] [21]
Noble has supervised or co-supervised over 50 successful PhD students to completion [13] [5] including Miklós Gyöngy, [22] Nathan Cahill, [23] Ramón Casero Cañas, [24] and Grace Vesom. [25] Her research has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC), [3] the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). [12] [26]
Noble was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017. [16] She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours, elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2008 [27] and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET) in 2001. [2] Noble was promoted to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to engineering and biomedical imaging. [28]
She is a trustee of the Oxford Trust, [29] a charity established by the founders of Oxford Instruments to encourage the study, application and communication of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. She is also a trustee of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and served as President of the Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) Society from 2013 to 2016. [30] As of 2017 [update] , Noble is an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and is a MICCAI Society Fellow. She was the first recipient of the Laura Bassi Award of the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2015. [31] Previously she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 2005 to 2011. [2] In 2018 she presented the Woolmer Lecture. [32] In 2019, Professor Noble was awarded the Gabor Medal by the Royal Society "for developing solutions to a number of key problems in biomedical image analysis and substantially advancing automatic extraction of clinically useful information from medical ultrasound scans".
Noble was a coxswain for the Oxford University Women's Lightweight Rowing Club in the Henley Boat Races in 1985.
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