Mike Houghton
Presented by Wendy Williams
Pro-Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, it gives me great pleasure to present Mike Houghton for the award of Honorary Fellow.
Liverpool John Moores University makes this prestigious award to those who have made an outstanding contribution to society, or an outstanding achievement by an individual in a given field, and who reflect the ethos and values of the University and the city of Liverpool.
Mike both champions and embodies University’s values of the transformative power of inclusive education, excellence, partnership, leadership, and community.
Liverpool-born and educated, Mike graduated from Liverpool Polytechnic in 1990 with a degree in Electrical, Electronic and Control Engineering.
He has since forged a highly-successful career in process engineering, working in the UK, the USA and now Germany, in his present role as Vice-President of Digital Enterprise and Vertical Markets for Siemens’ core Digital Industries Division, which employs 78,000 people worldwide.
Mike has been with Siemens for almost 20 years, holding a number of senior and strategic management roles across service support and training, industry automation, chemical and pharmaceutical sales and latterly as the UK and Ireland Managing Director of Siemens’ Process Industries and Drives Division, developing the foundations for the creation of the ‘digital enterprise’.
Digitalisation is the technology that is underpinning and driving the fourth industrial revolution, Industry Four Point Zero, and it is making everything from healthcare to renewable energy production to advanced manufacturing ‘smarter’, more flexible, more productive, more efficient, and more secure from cyber-attacks.
At the same time, high-value jobs are being created for our young graduate engineers and data scientists, to manage a data-rich interconnected world and a new, highly-digitalised industrial landscape.
Today Mike is working at the very cutting-edge of innovation in cyber-physical production systems. Despite his family and work commitments, Mike has continued to find time to support both LJMU’s engineering student body and the Liverpool City Region.
He was a member of the School of Engineering’s Industrial Advisory Committee from 2004 until 2012, supported the University in the recent delivery of the ‘The 21st Century Multidisciplinary Engineer’ project for the Higher Education sector, and has delivered a number of guest lectures.
He has served on the Board of the Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership, chaired the LCR 4.0 Making It Board and is a mentor to Liverpool’s SensorCity initiative.
Nationally, Mike chairs the UK Parliament’s Process and Engineering Sector Advisory Panel, one of ten specialist advisory groups commissioned by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Trade and Investment to inform the government’s Industrial Strategy.
He is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the Institute of Measurement & Control and a Member of the Institute of Engineering & Technology.
I am delighted to present an alumnus of the University for the award of an Honorary Fellowship, in recognition of outstanding professional achievement and as a champion of the positive contribution of engineering to our society.
