Electrical engineer and leader in optical and acoustic research
PROFESSOR SIR ERIC ASH, who has died aged 93, arrived in England in 1938 as a refugee from Nazi Germany and went on to become a leading figure in acoustic microscopy and optical fibre communications; in 1985 he was appointed Rector of Imperial College, London.
Ash did pioneering research on surface acoustic waves for signal processing, a technology which has important uses in mobile phones, televisions and satellite communications. His research also led to improvements in the resolution of acoustic microscopes – instruments which use ultra-highfrequency sound waves to examine the internal features of solid materials for defects and are widely used in industry.
The younger of two children, Eric Albert Ash was born to Jewish parents in Berlin on January 31 1928. His father Walter, head of the legal department of the electrical giant AEG, was advised by colleagues “not to worry about this silly man Hitler”, but he saw the way things were going and in 1938 moved his family to England.
Eric was educated at University College School, Hampstead, taking his school certificate in the school cellars because of air raids. Aged just 17 he won a scholarship to Imperial College, London, where he took a First then embarked on a PHD on “Electron Interaction Effects” under the Hungarian-born inventor of holograms and Nobel Prize winner Dennis Gabor.
Gabor remained a great influence, though Ash described him as an awful supervisor: “The worst experience was if he tried to stand in front of your equipment and twiddle the knobs. That was usually fatal!”
After two years on a Fulbright fellowship at Stanford University, California, working on microwave tubes, Ash returned to London in 1954. From 1955, after a year at Queen Mary’s College, London, he continued the work he had begun in the US at the Standard Telecommunications Laboratory in London.
In 1963 he joined the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at University College, London, where he continued his ultrasonics research and became a professor in 1967. He was appointed head of department in 1980.
In 1985 Ash became Rector of Imperial College, and in 1988 he presided over the merger with St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, a move which to his mind had the great benefit of increasing the proportion of women in the student body.
Imperial flourished under his leadership, even though he likened dealing with London University bureaucracy to being “trapped in a Kafka novel”.
In a 1991 interview he lamented the antiintellectualism pervasive in British society, which he felt had led to the underfunding and “graceful degradation” of the higher education system.
After retiring from Imperial in 1993, Ash worked on educational technology as an emeritus professor at UCL. He did consulting work for various companies, sitting on the board of British Telecom as a non-executive director from 1987 to 1993. He chaired the BBC’S Science Advisory Committee and was a trustee of the Royal Institution and the Science Museum, as well as serving as a member of the Advisory Council of the Campaign for Science and Engineering. He was CEO of the Student Loans Company (1994-96), remaining a non-executive director until 2000.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1977, serving as treasurer and vice-president from 1997 to 2002. His numerous awards included the 1984 Marconi Prize and the Institution of Electrical Engineers’ Faraday Medal in 1980. In 1988 he was President of the IEE for one year.
Ash, who listed his recreations in Who’s Who as “music, swimming, cycling”, was appointed CBE in 1983 and knighted in 1990.
In 1954 he married Clare Babb, with whom he had five daughters.
Professor Sir Eric Ash, born January 31 1928, died August 22 2021