Two leading figures from the University of Huddersfield have received honours at Buckingham Palace.
Self-made businessman Graham Leslie was at the palace to receive the CBE while Prof Xiangqian Jiang received a damehood. The awards, announced in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours, were conferred by the Duke of Cambridge, Prince William.
Mr Leslie, who shares his expertise with students at the university as Resident Professor of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, was awarded the honour for services to entrepreneurship.
The former hairdresser who moved into pharmaceuticals later established Galpharm International in Huddersfield in 1982 and developed it into the UK’s largest supplier of non-prescriptive medicine before selling it to the multi-national Perrigo Group for $88m.
Mr Leslie was also founder chairman and co-creator with Sir John Harman of Huddersfield’s 25,000 all-seater stadium, now the John Smith’s Stadium. It was branded the Galpharm Stadium for seven years.
In 2006 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of the university and six year later he became Resident Professor of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship with a base at the university’s 3M Buckley Innovation Centre.
Prof Jiang, known to colleagues as Jane, was recognised for services to engineering and manufacture. The Chinese-born scientist is a world-leading researcher in the field of metrology – the science of measurement.
It is the latest stage in a journey that has taken her from self-education in Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s China – where she was compelled to work on a production line – to academic eminence in her adopted UK.
Her roles at the university have included research director of its Centre for Precision Technologies (CPT) and director of its EPSRC Centre of Innovative Manufacturing in Advanced Metrology. She is now the director of the £40m Future Metrology Hub at the CPT.
Her parents were doctors in Shanghai, but lost their homes and careers during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. At the age of 15 Jane was put to work on a production line in a factory making buses and remained there for almost 20 years while she taught herself engineering and mathematics in the evenings.
For two decades the authorities turned down her request to go to university but in 1990 her admission exam results were so good she was allowed to enrol directly for a master’s degree at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, later gaining a PhD.
Aged 38, she came to Britain to work as a research engineer at Birmingham University before joining the University of Huddersfield in 1908. In 2007, she was ranked as the fifth most influential women of Chinese origin in the world.
