Overview

Join us for a special webinar hosted by Greene Medal 2025 winner Ian Shott.

Offering a fresh perspective, the talk covers the last hundred years of the profession’s evolution and asks what the next hundred years should look like. This is a one-off, inspiring and thought provoking chance to hear from an industry leader on the role of chemical engineers in shaping a sustainable future.

Drawing on his extensive experience as a global business leader, serial entrepreneur, and technology innovator, the session will reflect on:

• transformative impact of chemical engineering over the past century
• importance of innovation, scale-up, and cross-sector collaboration
• role of chemical engineers in tackling global challenges such as net zero, circular economy, and biotechnology
• how we can inspire and equip the next generation of engineers to lead the way.

This is more than a career retrospective, it’s a call to action for the profession to embrace its future with purpose, creativity, and collaboration. 

Speaker

Ian Shott, Executive Chairman, Shott Trinova

Ian is a serial entrepreneur having started up, taken over and transformed a dozen small and medium sized companies. He is currently invested in and on the board leading Quotient Sciences and Ingenza.

Prior to this entrepreneurial activity and over the previous two decades he was an executive board member, heading up global businesses, in blue chip listed companies (Astra Zeneca, Lonza and Rhodia) working and living in UK, France, Switzerland and the USA.

He is a past president of the IChemE and has been a fellow of the RAEng since 2008 serving on the MacRobert and policy committees and helping to create and lead the Enterprise Hub where he was committee chair from 2013 until 2019. He has made donations to support the RAEng Shott Accelerator, funding scholarships for disadvantaged students at Imperial College, the creation of the IChemE Sustainability Hub and reshaping the Chemical Engineers Benevolent Fund. The Enterprise Hub and accelerator have supported 300 startups and 300 SMEs seeking growth who have collectively gone on to raise over £2billion of follow on funding growing company values by over £1.5 billion and employing 5-6000 scientists and engineers in new roles.

He has been a leader on Engineering Biology for the last 20 years either leading or supporting a wide variety of Government, Academic, Business and learned society groups and is visiting professor at Oxford, Newcastle and Nottingham Universities.

He has received honorary doctorates from Imperial, Nottingham and Strathclyde Universities and a honorary fellowship from Newcastle University. He was appointed CBE in 2009 for services to the chemical engineering profession. He and his wife have a married son in New York and a married daughter in Singapore He is interested in sport, motoring, food and wine and theatre.

The material presented has not been peer-reviewed. Any opinions are the presenter’s own and do not necessarily represent those of IChemE or the Research and Innovation Special Interest Group. The information is given in good faith but without any liability on the part of IChemE.

Time

11:30–12:30 GMT.

Software

The presentation will be delivered via Microsoft Teams. We recommend downloading the app from the Microsoft website, rather than using the web portal.