Alison Noble

Julia Alison Noble (born 28 January 1965) is a British engineer. She has been Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Hilda's College^[2][1][7][8] since 2011, and Associate Head of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at the university. As of 2017^[update], she is the chief technology officer of Intelligent Ultrasound Limited,^[3] an Oxford spin-off in medical imaging^[4] that she cofounded. She was director of the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME) from 2012 to 2016.^[3][9] In 2023 she became the Foreign Secretary of The Royal Society (jointly with Mark Walport).^[10]

Alison Noble CBE FRS FREng FIET
Noble in 2017
Born	(1965-01-28) 28 January 1965 (age 60) Nottingham, England
Education	Maidstone Grammar School for Girls
Alma mater	University of Oxford (BA, DPhil)
Scientific career
Fields	Medical image analysis Ultrasound Cardiovascular imaging Oncological imaging Obstetric imaging Perinatal imaging[1]
Institutions	University of Oxford General Electric Corporate R&D Center[2] Intelligent Ultrasound Ltd.[3][4]
Thesis	Descriptions of image surfaces (1989)
Doctoral advisor	J. Michael Brady[5][6]
Website	ibme.ox.ac.uk/research/biomedia/people/professor-alison-noble

Education

Julia Alison Noble was born on 28 January 1965 in Nottingham, England, to James Bryan Noble and Patricia Ann Noble.^[2] She was educated at Maidstone Grammar School for Girls^[11] in Kent and was an undergraduate student at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she was awarded a first-class^[2] Bachelor of Arts degree in Engineering Science in 1986 followed by a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1989 for research on computer vision and image segmentation supervised by J. Michael Brady.^[5][6][12]

Career and research

Noble started her career as a research scientist at the General Electric Corporate R&D Center in Schenectady, New York, where she worked from 1989 to 1994 on developing inspection systems for aircraft engines.^[2][13][14] She returned to the University of Oxford as a lecturer in 1995 to work on medical applications of computer vision^[14] and was promoted to Professor in 2001,^[2] as the first female Statutory Professor in Engineering at Oxford.^[15]

Noble has made contributions to medical image computing, where her research interests combine knowledge of medical imaging and computational science to support decision-making in clinical medicine.^[1][16] Her research has advanced understanding of automatic extraction of clinically useful information from medical ultrasound scans and developed machine learning solutions to key problems in biomedical image analysis.^{[17][18][19][20][21]}

Noble has supervised or co-supervised over 50 successful PhD students to completion^[13][5] including Miklós Gyöngy,^[22] Nathan Cahill,^[23] Ramón Casero Cañas,^[24] and Grace Vesom.^[25] Her research has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC),^[3] the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).^[12][26]

Honours and awards

Noble was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017.^[16] She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours, elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2008^[27] and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET) in 2001.^[2] Noble was promoted to Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to engineering and biomedical imaging.^[28]

She is a trustee of the Oxford Trust,^[29] a charity established by the founders of Oxford Instruments to encourage the study, application and communication of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. She is also a trustee of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and served as President of the Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Interventions (MICCAI) Society from 2013 to 2016.^[30] As of 2017^[update], Noble is an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and is a MICCAI Society Fellow. She was the first recipient of the Laura Bassi Award of the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2015.^[31] Previously she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 2005 to 2011.^[2] In 2018 she presented the Woolmer Lecture.^[32] In 2019, Professor Noble was awarded the Gabor Medal by the Royal Society "for developing solutions to a number of key problems in biomedical image analysis and substantially advancing automatic extraction of clinically useful information from medical ultrasound scans".

Personal life

Noble was a coxswain for the Oxford University Women's Lightweight Rowing Club in the Henley Boat Races in 1985.

References

1. Alison Noble publications indexed by Google Scholar
2. "Noble, Prof. (Julia) Alison". Who's Who. A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U246718. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
3. Noble, Julia Alison (2017). "Professor Alison Noble: Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Associate Head of MPLS Division". University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 3 February 2017.
4. Anon (2017). "Julia Alison NOBLE". London: companieshouse.gov.uk. Archived from the original on 17 May 2017.
5. Alison Noble at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
6. Noble, Julia Alison (1989). Descriptions of image surfaces (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 863522054. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.238117.
7. Alison Noble publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
8. Alison Noble publications from Europe PubMed Central
9. Alison Noble – Popular Classics in Machine Learning for Medical Imaging on YouTube, Medical Imaging Summer School (MISS 2016)
10. "Council". The Royal Society. Retrieved 4 July 2023.
11. St Hugh's College (1983–1984). "St Hugh's College Chronicle 1983-4". issuu.com.
12. Alison Noble ORCID 0000-0002-3060-3772
13. Anon (2017). "Professor Alison Noble OBE". raeng.org.uk. Royal Academy of Engineering. Archived from the original on 17 May 2017.
14. Anon (2013). "Alison Noble: Women's Engineering Society". wes.org.uk. Archived from the original on 11 June 2016.
15. "Professor Alison Noble: OBE FREng FWES". wes.org.uk. Archived from the original on 1 August 2017. Retrieved 31 July 2017.
16. Anon (2017). "Professor Alison Noble OBE FREng FRS". London: royalsociety.org. Archived from the original on 5 May 2017.
17. Noble, J. Alison (1988). "Finding corners". Image and Vision Computing. 6 (2): 121–128. doi:10.1016/0262-8856(88)90007-8. ISSN 0262-8856. (subscription required)
18. Alsousou, J.; Thompson, M.; Hulley, P.; Noble, A.; Willett, K. (2009). "The biology of platelet-rich plasma and its application in trauma and orthopaedic surgery: a review of the literature". The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. 91-B (8): 987–996. doi:10.1302/0301-620X.91B8.22546. hdl:11630/4764. ISSN 0301-620X. PMID 19651823. (subscription required)
19. Wilson, D.L.; Noble, J.A. (1999). "An adaptive segmentation algorithm for time-of-flight MRA data". IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. 18 (10): 938–945. doi:10.1109/42.811277. ISSN 0278-0062. PMID 10628953. S2CID 12882219. (subscription required)
20. Noble, J.A.; Boukerroui, D. (2006). "Ultrasound image segmentation: a survey" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. 25 (8): 987–1010. doi:10.1109/TMI.2006.877092. ISSN 0278-0062. PMID 16894993. S2CID 14122909. (subscription required)
21. Xiao, Guofang; Brady, M.; Noble, J. A.; Zhang, Yongyue (2002). "Segmentation of ultrasound B-mode images with intensity inhomogeneity correction". IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. 21 (1): 48–57. doi:10.1109/42.981233. ISSN 0278-0062. PMID 11838663. S2CID 2522789. (subscription required)
22. Gyöngy, Miklós (2010). Passive cavitation mapping for monitoring ultrasound therapy (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 757123071. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.526539.
23. Cahill, Nathan D. (2009). Constructing and solving variational image registration problems (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 757120664. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.525268.
24. Casero Cañas, Ramón (2008). Left ventricle functional analysis in 2D+t contrast echocardiography within an atlas-based deformable template model (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 558154432. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.504312.
25. Vesom, Grace (2010). Poisson-based implicit shape space analysis with application to CT liver segmentation (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 757122067. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.526124.
26. Anon (2017). "UK Government research grants awarded to Alison Noble". rcuk.ac.uk. Swindon: Research Councils UK. Archived from the original on 17 May 2017.
27. Anon (2008). "New Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2008". raeng.org.uk. Archived from the original on 24 July 2017. Retrieved 28 May 2017.
28. "No. 64082". The London Gazette (Supplement). 17 June 2023. p. B10.
29. Anon (2017). "Meet our trustees". theoxfordtrust.co.uk. Oxford: The Oxford Trust. Archived from the original on 1 August 2017. Retrieved 31 July 2017.
30. Anon (2017). "Past and current president elected to Royal Science Academies". miccai.org. Archived from the original on 1 August 2017. Retrieved 31 July 2017.
31. Anon (2015). "Professor Alison Noble OBE FREng receives the IFMBE Laura Bassi Award for an Outstanding Female Researcher in Medical and Biological Engineering". University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 1 August 2017. Retrieved 31 July 2017.
32. "MPEC 2018 Programme".