Leicester Vice-Chancellor honoured for engineering career kickstarted by a mission to solve his mum’s hearing aid problems

The University of Leicester’s Vice-Chancellor has been honoured for his outstanding service to engineering – thanks to a career which was sparked by a desire to help his mother’s hearing aid problems.

Professor Sir Nishan Canagarajah has today [24 September] been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering – the highest distinction an engineer can achieve in the United Kingdom.

Sir Nishan’s childhood dream was to become a professor in engineering or maths.

He studied electronics and information sciences at Cambridge, where he stayed on to complete a PhD in digital signal processing.

His time as a PhD researcher remains Sir Nishan’s proudest professional moment – and it was all down to his mother’s difficulty with her hearing aid.

He said: “I was very keen to do research, but also wanted to make it useful, to have a benefit for people. I was trying to solve a problem called the cocktail party effect – essentially, how to make hearing aids better in a noisy environment. 

Reflecting on his Fellowship, Sir Nishan said: “I am incredibly proud to be recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering.

“Engineering gave me the opportunity to come to the UK at a time when my family and I were living in poverty, in the thick of a brutal civil war.

“While engineering was my ticket to bettering myself, I went into the discipline with a desire to use it to help other people. To see how my research helped my very own mother is certainly my proudest professional moment.”

Sir Nishan is now internationally recognised for his research on signal processing and texture classification. He served on national and international research funding, governance and postgraduate education panels, as well as acting as a technical consultant for Sony, BT, BBC, Orange, Thales, Toshiba and the Met Police.

He joined the University of Bristol as a research assistant in 1993 and worked in a number of academic roles, serving as the Faculty of Engineering Research Director, Head of Department of Computer Science, Head of Merchant Venturers School of Engineering and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering. He became Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise in 2014, before assuming the role of President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester in 2019.

Sir Nishan is one of 75 new Fellows, announced in the year of the Academy’s 50th anniversary, who are making an incredible impact across the engineering and technology sector with innovations in clean energy, AI, medicine and public health.

These leading figures have influenced academia and business, worked to widen participation in engineering for people from underrepresented backgrounds, and provided expert policy advice to government. 

The Fellows elected this year reflect the lasting impact of the Academy's Fellowship Fit for the Future initiative, launched in July 2020 ahead of the Academy's 50th anniversary. The campaign successfully exceeded its ambition, with more than 50% of Fellows elected during the initiative coming from underrepresented groups. As a result, the initiative has now been fully embedded into the Academy's business-as-usual Fellowship processes. It continues to drive nominations of outstanding engineers from a broader range of backgrounds, including women, disabled and LGBTQ+ engineers, those from ethnic minority backgrounds, non-traditional educational pathways and emerging industries, as well as engineers who have achieved excellence at an earlier career stage than has traditionally been recognised. 

The new Fellows will be formally admitted to the Academy at a special ceremony in London on 19 October, when each Fellow will sign the roll book. In joining the Fellowship, they will lend their unique capabilities to achieving the Academy’s overarching strategic goal to engineer better lives.    

Sir John Lazar CBE FREng, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: “As we celebrate our 50th anniversary this year, we also mark the Academy’s achievements since it was founded as the Fellowship of Engineering on 11 June 1976 at Buckingham Palace, with the enthusiastic backing of HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, our Founding Senior Fellow. Our Fellowship has been at the core of our work for the past 50 years, connecting the businesses leaders, entrepreneurs, researchers and policymakers who are at the heart of the UK’s technological progress. 

“This year’s cohort will be joining a community of over 1,700 top engineers and innovators in the UK and around the world. Together, we ensure that bright ideas are supported, scaled and shared, turning ambition into innovation and innovation into impact. We aim to strengthen education, skills and inclusion to inspire and equip the engineers of today and tomorrow.”