Colin Bailey (engineer)

Colin Gareth Bailey CBE FREng CEng FICE FIStructE is a researcher in structural engineering, who became the President and Principal of Queen Mary University of London in September 2017. Prior to that, Bailey was Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Manchester.[1] He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Structural Engineers and a member of the Institution of Fire Engineers.

Bailey left school at 16 to start work as an apprentice draughtsman at a construction firm in London, and worked for several design consultants. Aged 22, he began a degree in civil and structural engineering at the University of Sheffield, graduating with a first class BEng in 1992, followed by a PhD in 1995,[2] and postdoctoral work in building fire safety.[3]

He joined the University of Manchester in 2002 as Professor of Structural Engineering, and became Head of the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering in 2007. His leadership achievements at Manchester include the launch of high-profile research projects, including the BP International Centre for Advanced Materials, the National Graphene Institute (£61m of funding support) and the Sir Henry Royce Institute (£283m of funding).[4]

As a non-executive director, he is on the boards of several charities and organisations.[5]

Bailey is author of more than 130 research papers, conference papers and practical design guides, and has been awarded nine prizes for his research work. His main specialties are fire safety engineering of structures, membrane action, wind loading and steel-concrete composite systems.[6]

Bailey is well-known globally in the field of structural fire engineering and has published 10 practical fire design guides/books.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] This has included the publication of the ‘Bailey’ fire design method,[17][18][19] which has been used in design software and distributed to 2,500 companies in 20 countries.[20] He has been a third party reviewer for a number of projects[21] and an Expert Witness on a number of incidents including the World Trade Centre.[22]

Bailey is one of the four experts to sit on a Government independent expert advisory panel on building safety,[23] set up in December 2017 to advise on immediate safety action following the Grenfell Tower fire, and chaired by Sir Ken Knight, former London Fire Commissioner and former Government Chief Fire and Rescue Adviser. The panel has produced extensive building safety advice.[24][25]

In 2018, Bailey was awarded an Honorary Professorship by Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in China.[26]

He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to engineering.[27]

Bailey was involved in a controversy during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 when the students’ union claimed that he had refused to allow them to access the UK government's Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) to claim more than their actual wage bill. The University responded by clarifying that the students’ union was in fact prohibited by government guidelines from being able to claim more than their actual wage bill from the CJRS and that the University had committed to making sure that student workers were paid their expected wages.[28]