Alison Noble

Noble was educated at St Hugh’s College, Oxford where she was awarded a 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 Michael Brady.

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. She returned to the University of Oxford as a lecturer in 1995 to work on medical applications of computer vision and was promoted to Professor in 2002.

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. 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.

Noble has supervised or co-supervised over 50 successful PhD students to completion and several postdoctoral researchers in her laboratory. Her research has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Awards and honours

Noble was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017. She was appointed Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours, elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2008 and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET).