Megan Povey

Megan Povey was born in Wallasey on the Wirral to Denys Povey and Nancy Jones, and grew up in Rochdale before later settling in Slaithwaite, West Yorkshire. Her father was a flour-milling engineer, and she often accompanied him around flour mills as a child, which she later said gave her a lasting fascination with factories and what goes on inside them.

She studied physics at Lancaster University. As a student in the 1960s she became involved in political activism, including campaigning against nuclear power. She stayed at Lancaster for her doctorate, completing a thesis in 1973 titled The Electromagnetic Generation of Ultrasonics in Ferromagnetic Metals.

Because her doctoral work had significant military potential, Povey received several offers of research and development posts from defence contractors. Anti-war and committed to civil rights, she declined them and, with a young family to support, joined the food science department at the University of Leeds as a postdoctoral researcher in the mid-1970s. She later said she knew nothing about food science at the time, only that she liked cooking and eating.

Her idea of using ultrasound to investigate food was initially met with scepticism in a department dominated by chemists and biochemists, but visiting scientists from Unilever funded her early work on fats. Over the following decades she built an international reputation in ultrasound spectroscopy for food characterisation and ultrasound processing in food manufacturing. Her group combined mathematical and computer modelling with experiment, studying fat crystal nucleation and growth, oil-based foams for lower-calorie confectionery, and the physics of digestion with a view to foods suited to older people. Her monograph Ultrasonic Techniques for Fluids Characterization was published by Academic Press in 1997.

She became Professor of Food Physics at Leeds and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and was a founding member of the institute's Physical Acoustics group and its Physics in Food Manufacturing group, chairing the latter's conference at Leeds in 2020. She was a prolific and widely cited author and mentored many younger scientists.

Povey was also a trade unionist throughout her career. She joined the committee of the Association of University Teachers at Leeds, serving among other roles as its press officer, and after the formation of the University and College Union she was elected to UCU's first National Executive Committee, serving three terms from 2007 to 2013. As Leeds UCU president from 2009 to 2011 she led a campaign against compulsory redundancies in biological sciences that ended in a deal saving the jobs. She later worked on USS pensions as an elected negotiator and disputes committee member.

Povey spoke openly about her gender identity. In December 2017 she told her family that for as long as she could remember she had been a woman inside her head, and she transitioned publicly in 2018, during that year's university pensions strike. She described the experience as frightening but massively liberating, and said she wanted to claim her past and her work as part of who she was.

She became an LGBTQ+ role model at the University of Leeds and in science more widely, sat on UCU's national LGBTQ+ and women's committees, and campaigned for trans rights. She was also a long-standing anti-racist and anti-fascist campaigner and a member of Scientists for Global Responsibility. She had three children, Matthew, Jay and Jasmine, and in her later years spent many happy hours with her partner, Elena, in Harrogate.

Megan Povey died peacefully in the early hours of Wednesday 9 September 2026 at Harrogate Hospital, aged 78. She had been taken ill the previous week after a cardiac arrest. Her death was announced by the University of Leeds branch of UCU on 10 September, and the university's School of Food Science and Nutrition published an obituary describing her as an outstanding scientist who pioneered the use of acoustics to analyse food structure.

Her funeral took place at Park Wood Cemetery, Elland, on 1 October 2026, followed by a reception at the North of England Centre for Music and Arts in Marsden. Mourners were invited to wear bright, colourful clothing, and the family asked for donations to Stand Up to Racism or Stonewall UK.

Povey helped establish food physics as a discipline and made ultrasound and acoustics standard tools for studying the structure of foods and other complex materials without destroying them. Colleagues at Leeds credited her with a huge contribution to the development of the School of Food Science and Nutrition and with shaping many academic careers.

In the union movement she is remembered for decades of organising at Leeds and nationally, and for her encouragement of newer activists. Her openness about her transition late in a distinguished career made her an influential example for transgender and LGBTQ+ people in academia.