Anne Neville

Early life and education Anne Neville was born on 21 March 1970 in Dumfries, where she also grew up with her older sister Linda. Their mother Doris worked as a pharmacy technician and their father Bill was a process worker at ICI Dumfries. Her uncle is Professor Robert Black, Emeritus Professor of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh. Anne attended Maxwellton High School where her interest in maths and physics grew. Anne was also a good badminton player and played the trumpet.

She was educated at Maxwelltown High School

Neville began her studies at the University of Glasgow in 1988 and she graduated in 1992 with a First Class Honours BEng degree followed by PhD in mechanical engineering in 1995.

Neville and her group moved to Leeds in 2003 where she founded and was the Director of the Institute of Functional Surfaces (iFS) which comprised 70 researchers. The institute had a £10 million funding portfolio that spanned many agencies and industrial sectors including medical, oil and gas and automotive.

Her research group was the first to measure corrosion rates in-situ in hip joint simulators. This was very important in the most recent controversies around metal-on-metal implants. Anne Neville's publications were numerous, widely relied upon, and she published nearly 700 peer-reviewed articles during her career, with more than 11,000 citations.

Personal life Anne Neville married Mark McKelvie in 1999 and their daughter Rachel was born in 2005.

"Male or female… go for it! You will have the time of your life. I can honestly say I love my job. As an academic in engineering I can do what I want in terms of research as long as I can raise the funds to pay for it. This is a real privilege. I have travelled the world, met some brilliant people and have had great fun. What else could you ask for in a job?"

Health and death Neville was first diagnosed with cancer in 2008. elected a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (FIMechE) in 2007, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2005, elected a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining in 2009 and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2010. In 2015, Neville was awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Suffrage Science award. She was the first woman to be awarded the Institute of Mechanical Engineers' James Clayton Prize and she was also the first woman to win the Royal Society's Leverhulme Medal in 2016 for "revealing diverse physical and chemical processes at interacting interfaces, emphasising significant synergy between tribology and corrosion.”

Neville was appointed OBE in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to engineering. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017.

She received the following honorary degrees:

DEng, Heriot Watt University, 2017 DEng, University of Glasgow, 2019

Neville was awarded the Royal Society's Clifford Patterson Medal in 2022.

She was posthumously inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame in October 2022.

Her name is one of those featured on the sculpture Ribbons, unveiled in 2024.