OBITUARIES Professor David Newland (SE 1954, Fellow 1976-2020)
PART FIVE
David Edward Newland was born at Knebworth in 1936. He was Head Boy at Alleyne’s Grammar School, Stevenage, before coming up to Selwyn in 1954 to read Mechanical Sciences (as the Engineering Tripos was then called). He graduated in 1957 with the top first of his year and was awarded the Ricardo and Rex Moir Prizes. It would be almost two decades before he returned to Cambridge. After working for the English Electric Company for four years he crossed the Atlantic to pursue a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), completing his thesis in 1963 on ‘Nonlinear vibrations: a comparative study with application to centrifugal pendulum vibration absorbers’. After a brief period as assistant professor at MIT he returned to the UK in 1964 to take up an appointment as a lecturer at Imperial College London. David remained there for only three years because, in 1967, he was appointed Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He was just thirtyone. It was during his time at Sheffield that he started to engage in professional practice and to be in demand as an expert witness. He was called to give evidence to the enquiry into the Flixborough disaster of 1974, Britain’s worst peacetime industrial accident, with twenty-eight fatalities and thirty-six seriously injured. According to James Talbot, in his obituary on the website of the Department of Engineering: ‘Newland proved to be the key expert witness, showing the cause of the explosion to have been the dynamic failure of a bellows expansion joint in a temporary pipe between two reactors. The case made engineering history, and saw Newland appointed chair of the BSI committee responsible for preparing a new British Standard for these components.’ David returned to Cambridge in 1976 as Professor of Engineering, a post which he held until his retirement in 2003. He was also elected a Fellow of Selwyn in the same year. In the Department of Engineering he served as head of the Mechanics, Materials and Design Division, playing a major role in the establishment of the Manufacturing Engineering course, the Engineering Design Centre and the four-year Engineering degree. He was Head of Department from 1996 to 2002 and a director of the CambridgeMIT Institute (1999-2002). In the University he served as a Deputy Vice-Chancellor from 1999 to 2003. Honours and recognition for his research came his way from many institutions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1982 and was a member of its Council from 1985 to 1987. His research earned him a Cambridge ScD and he was awarded an Honorary DEng by the University of Sheffield. He was a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, the
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Selwyn College Calendar 2020–2021
