Professor Emeritus Reinhards Vitols
19 October 1925 – 12 October 2019
Ray Vitols was born in Latvia on 19 October 1925 and came to England in 1947 as a displaced person following WWII to work as a coal miner in Stoke on Trent. He eventually made a career in Nottingham designing lace-making machines before joining the staff of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Loughborough University in 1970 as a Lecturer in Engineering Design.
Ray became a principal innovator with well over £1m research income; he was a remarkable innovator in textile mechanisms and many of his ideas went into production. Ray was awarded his DTech in 1988 on the basis of 19 designs for machines in the textile and packaging industries and 16 patents. He retired from the University in 1991.
In recent years Ray had worked in Latvia on staff development and international relations at the Riga Technical University (RTU), and was awarded their Honorary Doctorate in 1994 for outstanding achievements in the development of engineering sciences. He is survived by his wife Zenta.