NPL Senior Fellow elected Fellow of the Royal Society

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Professor Graham Machin is a Senior Fellow at NPL, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde’s Department of Physics. He has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of a career spanning more than 30 years in the field of temperature measurement. 

With his NPL research team, Professor Machin has had a significant global impact on the definition and measurement of temperature, including redefining the unit of temperature, the kelvin, and developing new standards and methods for high temperature measurement, as well as developing temperature measurement solutions in fields including space, nuclear decommissioning and medicine. He is a founder member of the UK Body Temperature Measurement Group (UKBTMG), which aims to reduce avoidable deaths and improve health service triaging. He also serves as the UK member on the International Weights and Measures Committee for Thermometry (CCT) https://www.bipm.org/en/committees/cc/cct/.  

With colleagues at Strathclyde, he is currently playing a leading role in research into the development of a practical optically based primary thermometer based on Doppler broadening. He is also NPL’s science lead for nuclear decommissioning metrology. 

Professor Machin joins a group of around 1700 Fellows. Each year, up to 52 Fellows and up to 10 Foreign Members are elected from a pool of around 800 candidates, who are proposed by the existing Fellowship. 

Professor Machin joined NPL in 1991 and has published more than 270 research papers in the course of his career. He said: It is a great honour to have my work recognised by being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. I pay tribute to the many excellent scientists in my team without whom I could not have achieved all that I have.