fellows.directory

Data

Where each fact in the directory comes from, how it is checked and how current it is.

1,799 Fellows · last updated

How the data is built

The starting point is the Academy’s public Fellows directory. Open sources then add a current organisation and role, a sector, research topics, a short summary and links to public profiles. Where none of them has these, a language model searches the web for public pages about the Fellow; each fact it finds is kept only if a quotation from the page supports it, and the page is fetched again to check that the quotation is there.

Nothing from another source is published until that source is shown to be about the same person (see identity checks), and every fact keeps a record of where it came from.

Only professional information is collected. Location is the region listed by the Academy, never a town or city. There are no contact details and no citation metrics.

Sources and licences

Royal Academy of EngineeringFacts only

The Fellows directory gives each Fellow’s name, post-nominal letters, election year, fellowship type, region, expertise tags and the address of their photo. Election citations and lists give the role and organisation when the Fellow was elected. Facts are extracted and linked; the Academy’s text and photos are never copied or republished.

The directory’s own search is also used to confirm a Fellow’s organisation (see identity checks).

WikidataCC0

Identifiers that tie a Fellow to other sources, a current employer, and links to Wikipedia, ORCID, Google Scholar, LinkedIn and personal websites.

WikipediaCC BY-SA 4.0

The opening summary of the Fellow’s article, shown on the profile with personal details such as dates of birth removed, and credited to the article under its licence.

Wikimedia Commons

A portrait for Fellows the Academy has no photo of: the image on the Fellow’s Wikidata entry, used only when it is in the public domain or under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, and credited to its author (see photos).

OpenAlexCC0

The most recent institution on the Fellow’s publications, its sector (from the institution’s type in the Research Organization Registry), research topics and links.

ORCIDCC0

ORCID iDs, found through Wikidata and OpenAlex, used to confirm a Fellow’s identity and linked from profiles.

Public web pagesFacts only

Pages from employers, universities, companies and Fellows’ own websites, found by research where the sources above have nothing. They provide an organisation, role, sector, topics, links and the facts behind generated summaries. Each fact is kept only with a quotation from its page that supports it.

Corrections

Facts corrected by hand after a request, marked “Manual correction” on the profile.

Which source is used

When sources disagree, the first available source in this order is used. Agreement between two sources raises the confidence of a fact.

  • Organisation and role: OpenAlex’s most recent institution if it is no more than two years old, then Wikidata’s current employer, then the Academy’s election citation (shown as of the election year), then research.
  • Sector: the institution’s type in the Research Organization Registry, then research. Otherwise, when the organisation is from the last five years, the kind of organisation it is (a company is industry, a university academia), marked “inferred from the organisation”.
  • Summary: the Wikipedia summary where there is one, otherwise a summary generated from the Fellow’s checked facts.
  • Links: identifiers recorded in Wikidata, then those linked from OpenAlex and ORCID, then research.
  • Region: the Academy’s directory only.
  • Listed under: the organisations the Academy’s directory search by company returns the Fellow for, shown for every Fellow and without a date, as the directory gives none; never taken as their current organisation. The search matches part of a name, so a term that could also be another organisation’s is reviewed by hand or left out.
  • Expertise: the Academy’s tags, with OpenAlex research topics added.

A correction made by hand after a request overrides every source.

Provenance and confidence

Every fact beyond the Academy’s own directory entry is stored with the address of its source, the date it was retrieved, how it was obtained (read from a page, from an API, found by a language model or entered by hand), its licence and a confidence level. Each profile lists its sources.

  • High confidence: two sources agree, or the Academy’s directory search confirms the organisation.
  • Medium confidence: one source.
  • Low confidence: research alone, or information more than five years old.

Identity checks

Before a fact from another source is published, the source has to be shown to be about the same person rather than someone with the same name. Each Fellow is graded:

Grade A

Matched to a Wikidata or ORCID record, and the election year agrees.

287 Fellows

Grade B

The Academy’s own directory search confirms the name together with the organisation.

634 Fellows

Grade C

A second source names the person as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), or the Academy’s election announcement matches the name and year.

535 Fellows

Grade D

Not confirmed: only the Academy’s own directory entry is shown, and no facts from other sources are published.

343 Fellows

Where two Fellows share a name, two independent confirmations are needed.

How complete it is

What the profiles show, counted from the published data.

Fellows listed
1,799
An organisation (current, or at election)
1,232 (68%)
A Wikipedia summary
454 (25%)
A generated summary
752 (42%)
Placed on the map
1,660 (92%)

Models

The site reaches these models through OpenRouter.

Interpreting a search
google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite
Ordering results and writing reasons
google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite
Matching by meaning
openai/text-embedding-3-small

When the data is built, research, generated summaries and the names of the fields on the map are written with Claude, by Anthropic, or Codex, by OpenAI, and checked before anything is published. A generated summary uses only facts already checked for that Fellow, and the profile labels it as generated.

For Fellows with no subject on record, a language model matched their published role, organisation or summary to the Academy’s own subject terms, used only to place them on the map and never shown.

Updates

The Academy’s directory is read again on the first day of each month. New Fellows, departures and changed details are checked and published in that month’s update, and Fellows who asked to be removed stay removed. Facts from other sources are refreshed when the data is rebuilt in full; each profile shows when every fact was retrieved. The data was last updated on .

Photos

Photos are shown directly from the Academy’s website: your browser loads each one from raeng.org.uk, and fellows.directory never copies, stores or alters them. Where the Academy has no photo, a freely licensed portrait from Wikimedia Commons, taken from the Fellow’s Wikidata entry, is shown the same way and credited to its author under its licence. Link previews never include a photo. Where there is no photo, or it does not load, the Fellow’s initials are shown instead.

Photo credits