Clifford Paterson Lecture

The Clifford Paterson Lecture is a prize lecture of the Royal Society now given biennially on an engineering topic. A £500 gift is given to the lecturer. The lectures, which honour Clifford Copland Paterson, founder-director of the GEC Wembley Research Laboratories 1918-1948, were instituted by the General Electric Company plc in 1975.

Not to be confused with the Institute of Physics Clifford Paterson Medal and Prize.

Clifford Paterson Lectures
Lecturers include:


 * 1976 Eric Eastwood on Radar: new techniques and applications
 * 1977 Gordon Rawcliffe on Induction motors: old and new
 * 1978 Eric Ash on Recent advances in acoustic imaging
 * 1979 Gordon George Scarrott on From slave to servant: the evolution of computing systems
 * 1980 Derek Harry Roberts on Memory: its function, technology and impact
 * 1981 Cyril Hilsum on Electronic displays: the link between man and microcircuit
 * 1982 Michael Crowley-Milling on The worlds largest accelerator: the electron-positron collider LEP''
 * 1983 John Edwin Midwinter on Optical fibre communications, present and future
 * 1984 Alexander Lamb Cullen on Microwaves: the art and the science
 * 1985 George William Gray on Liquid crystals: an arena for research and industrial collaboration among chemists, physicists and engineers
 * 1986 Alec Nigel Broers on Fundamental limits to microstructure fabrication
 * 1987 Gareth Gwyn Roberts on At home with science and technology
 * 1988 Walter Thompson Welford on Microlithography and the ultraviolet: experiments with an excimer laser
 * 1989 Alan Walter Rudge on The organization and management of R&D in a privatised British Telecom
 * 1990 Maurice Wilkes on Progress and research in the computer industry
 * 1991 David N. Payne on Circuits, sensors and strands of light
 * 1992 Marcel Garnier on Magnetohydrodynamics in material processing
 * 1993 I.R. Young on Accurate measurement in vivo magnetic resonance: an engineering problem?
 * 1994 Michael Brady on Seeing machines and robots
 * 1995 Frank Kelly on Modelling communication networks: present and future''
 * 1996 Martin Wood on Superconductivity: will the dream come true?
 * 1997 Gareth Parry on From electrons and photons to optoelectronics and photonics
 * 1998 Colin Webb on Making light work: applications of high power lasers
 * 1999 Andy Hopper on Progress and research in the communications industry
 * 2000 Eli Yablonovitch on Electronmagnetic bandgaps, at photonic and radio frequencies
 * 2001 Allan Snyder on Light guiding light in the new millennium
 * 2002 Roger Needham on Computer Security?
 * 2003 Chris Toumazou on The bionic man
 * 2004 Sandu Popescu on What is quantum non-locality?
 * 2005 Wilson Sibbett on Optical science in the fast lane
 * 2006 Richard Friend on Plastic fantastic; electronics for the 21st Century. The lecture can be view from the Video Library 
 * 2008 Martin Bodo Plenio, on Taming the Quanta
 * 2009 Andrew DeMello on The Lilliput laboratory: chemistry & biology on the small scale
 * 2010 David MacKay on Information theory meets writing
 * 2011 S. Ravi P. Silva on Carbon electronics
 * 2012 Molly Stevens on Regenerating organs and other small challenges
 * 2014 Polina Bayvel on Fundamental research in high bandwidth digital communications and nonlinear optics
 * 2016 Russell Cowburn for his remarkable academic, technical and commercial achievements in nano-magnetics
 * 2018 Timothy Leighton for translation of his fundamental research into acoustics and its application in many areas ...
 * 2020 Jacqui Cole for the development of photo-crystallography and the discovery of novel high-performance nonlinear optical materials and light-harvesting dyes using molecular design rules
 * 2022 Anne Neville for her innovative research into corrosion and tribology and the successful application of this to wide-ranging, real life, engineering problems