The Engineering Professors' Council is a British university association that represents university staff in UK engineering facilities, for discussing and coordinating course content and direction. [1]
The Engineering Professors' Conference was set up in the early 1950s to allow an annual conference, held in London, where Engineering academic staff could meet.
It was set up by Edmund Giffen (1 January 1902 - 2 July 1963), a Northern Irish professor of mechanical engineering from Gilford, County Down, and director of research from 1940 to 1945 for the Institution of Automobile Engineers, notably on diesel engines, which soon after became the Automotive branch of the IMechE. [2] [3] [4]
The EPC became a recognised organisation around 1974.
The Committee for Engineering in Polytechnics was formed in 1979, under chairman Thomas Deas Eastop (April 1931 - September 2018), head of the department of Mechanical Engineering at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, who authored the standard reference textbook Applied Thermodynamics for Engineering Technologists ISBN 0582444292, with Allan McConkey, head of the department of Mechanical Engineering at Dundee Institute of Technology.
In the early 1980s, the EPC requested that the Engineering section was removed from the Science and Engineering Research Council, with a separate Engineering research council. This would happen by 1994, with the formation of the EPSRC. [5]
The organisation was formed in January 1994 by the merger of the Engineering Professors' Conference and the Committee for Engineering in Polytechnics.
It has worked with the Office for Students (OfS) and with the UK government (the Science and Technology Select Committee) on funding for engineering research at UK universities. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
The society holds an annual two-day conference at different universities.
It is headquartered in Surrey.