Professor John Brignell
Professor Emeritus
(ESD)
John Brignell was educated at Stationers’
Company’s School and began his career as an apprentice at STC. He studied
at Northampton Engineering
College (which became The City University, London) and took the degrees of BSc(Eng) and PhD of London University. He joined the staff
at Northampton
and was successively Research Assistant, Research Fellow and Lecturer. He
worked in a number of areas including dielectric liquids and computer aided
measurement, co-authoring a book "Laboratory on-line computing" in
1975. He was for ten years Reader in Electronics at The City University and
held the Chair in Industrial Instrumentation at Southampton
for twenty years from 1980. He has researched and written extensively in the
area of sensors and their applications, and in 1994 co-authored a book with Neil White on
"Intelligent sensor systems". He had an extensive private consultancy
practice for many years and has advised some of the larger international
companies, as well as many small ones in the UK, on all aspects of industrial instrumentation.
He pioneered the use of a number of technologies in sensing, such as thick
film, and latterly turned his attention to the considerable possibilities of
micro-engineering. He was elected Fellow of IOP, InstMC,
IEE and RSA. In 1994 he was awarded the Callendar
Silver Medal by InstMC. He served on the ISAT Committee of IoP from its inception
and was the founding chairman of the first joint professional group of the IEE (J1), having served on both its
predecessors (E1 and C11).
John was closely involved, since their beginnings, with the
national series of conferences on Sensors and their Applications and the
Eurosensors conferences. He took time out to organise Eurosensors XII, which
took place in Southampton in 1998. He has now
taken early retirement (to the West Country) in order to spend more time on
various writing projects. His book
Sorry, wrong number!, about the abuse of
measurement in politics and the media, was published in September 2000. This
was followed in 2004 by a sequel called The Epidemiologists: have they got
scares for you!.
He also dedicates a considerable amount of his time to
editing a web site called Number Watch at http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/ which
deals with wrong numbers in the media and politics and includes a Number of
the Month. It currently receives well over 1,000 visits per day and has a
lively forum for
general discussion.
John still gives occasional lectures at venues such as
Lloyds of London, mainly on the abuse of statistics. He was the IEE Wheatstone
Lecturer for 2004. He also occasionally advises industrial and other
organizations on matters relating to measurement and statistics.
Department of Electronics & Computer
Science,
University of Southampton,
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ
Home telephone: 01747 861114
Email: jeb@numberwatch.co.uk