Sheila Rowan

Education Rowan was born on 25 November 1969 in Dumfries, Dumfriesshire, Scotland. She was educated at Maxwelltown High School, a comprehensive school in Dumfries. Her PhD was research on gravitational waves and was supervised by James Hough. She led a team which worked on the international Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) collaboration. This collaboration led in September 2015 to the detection of gravitational waves for the first time after Albert Einstein's prediction.

In June 2016, Rowan was seconded (part-time) to chief scientific advisor to the Scottish Government, She was succeeded by Julie FitzPatrick who took up the post of Scotland's Chief Scientific Adviser on 14 June 2021.

Awards and honours

Rowan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in 2008 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018. Rowan was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Astronomy and Astrophysics in 2005, elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (FInstP) in 2006 and awarded Fellowship of the American Physical Society in 2012. In 2016, Rowan was among a team of researches to be awarded the President's Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In July 2019, Rowan was elected to the role of president-elect by the Institute of Physics. She took up the post of President on 1 October 2021. In 2020, Rowan won the Sir Harold Hartley Medal by the Institute of Measurement and Control for outstanding contribution to the technology of measurement and control. Rowan was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours,

Patents

Rowan was awarded a patent for silicon carbide bonding in 2010 by the European Patent Office. The patent covers a novel method for bonding silicon carbide components to themselves and to other materials.