The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senior fellow and remained so until his death. The Fellowship was incorporated and granted a royal charter on 17 May 1983 and became the Royal Academy of Engineering on 16 March 1992. It is governed according to the charter and associated statutes and regulations (as amended from time to time). In June 2024 His Majesty the King became Patron of the Academy.
History Conceived in the late 1960s, during the Apollo space program and Harold Wilson's espousal of "white heat of technology", the Fellowship of Engineering was born in the year of Concorde's first commercial flight. The Fellowship's first meeting, at Buckingham Palace on 11 June 1976, enrolled 126 of the UK's leading engineers. The first fellows included Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, the jet engine developer, the structural engineer Sir Ove Arup, radar pioneer Sir George G. MacFarlane, the inventor of the bouncing bomb, Sir Barnes Wallis, Francis Thomas Bacon, the inventor of the alkaline fuel cell, and father of the UK computer industry Sir Maurice Wilkes. The Fellowship's first president, Christopher Hinton, had driven the UK's supremacy in nuclear power. The Fellowship focused on championing excellence in all fields of engineering. Activities began in earnest in the mid-1970s with the Distinction lecture series, now known as the Hinton lectures. The Fellowship was asked to advise the Department of Industry for the first time, and the Academy became host and presenter of the MacRobert Award. In the 1980s, the Fellowship received its own royal charter along with its first government grant-in-aid. At the same time, it also received significant industrial funding, initiated its research programme to build bridges between academia and industry, and opened its doors to international and honorary fellows. In 1990, the Academy launched its first major initiative in education, Engineering Education Continuum, which evolved into the BEST Programme and Shape the Future and Tomorrow's Engineers. The Academy's increasing level of influence – in policy, research and education – was recognized when it was granted a royal title and became The Royal Academy of Engineering in 1992. In 2014 the academy launched its annual Africa Prize. The Academy's current logo is inspired by the Neolithic hand axe, humans' first technological advance, which was taken to be a symbol appropriate to the Academy, supposedly representative of the ever-changing relationship between humanity and technology.
Location The Academy's premises, Prince Philip House, 3–4 Carlton House Terrace, are in a Grade I listed building overlooking St James's Park, designed by architect John Nash and owned by the Crown Estate. The Academy shares the Terrace with two of its sister academies, the British Academy and the Royal Society, as well as other institutes. The building was renamed Prince Philip House, after renovation works were completed in 2012.
Activities The Academy supports engineering research and innovation, skills and entrepreneurship, policy development, international collaboration, and public engagement. Its 2025–2030 strategy groups these activities under three goals: Sustainable and Innovative Economy, Technology Improving Lives, and Engineering Community Fit for the Future. The Academy leads the National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC), a partnership established in 2019 between professional engineering organisations to advise policymakers. From 2022, the centre became the formal coordinating mechanism for engineering education and skills policy, a role previously served by Education for Engineering (E4E). The Academy receives government funding as one of the UK's four national academies. For 2025–26, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) said it was investing £217 million across the four academies, mostly in talent schemes, following a £150 million endowment to the Academy itself in 2023–24 for its Green Future Fellowships. National-academy funding also supported public engagement under the government's 2010–2015 policy on public understanding of science and engineering. The Academy has published Ingenia, a magazine about engineering and technology for non-specialist readers, since its launch in 1999. The magazine was described by its editors in 2024 as aimed primarily at people aged 13 to 25 with an interest in STEM, and as reaching more than 4,000 schools across the UK.
Presidents The president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the elected officer of the Academy, presides over meetings of the council. The president is elected for a single term of not more than five years.
Fellows
The Fellowship currently includes more than 1,500 engineers from all sectors and disciplines of engineering. The fellows, distinguished by the title Fellow of The Royal Academy of Engineering and the post-nominal designation FREng, lead, guide, and contribute to the Academy's work and provide expertise. The Royal Fellows of the Academy are the Duke of Kent and the Princess Royal.
Diversity The Academy strives to ensure that the pool of candidates for election to the Fellowship better reflects the diverse make-up of society as a whole. It set up the Proactive Membership Committee in 2008 to identify and support the nomination of candidates from underrepresented areas, with the aim of boosting the number of women candidates, engineers from industry and small and medium enterprises, those from emerging technologies and ethnically diverse backgrounds.
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