Professor Dominic Hudson

Marine Craft Concept Design

Yacht and High Performance Craft

Offshore Engineering and Analysis

Dominic is Shell Professor of Ship Safety and Efficiency at the University of Southampton and leads the Centre for Maritime Futures. He has research interests in all aspects of hydrodynamics, particularly as related to ship design and operation for energy efficiency. Dominic advises Shell Shipping and Maritime on ship efficiency, decarbonisation, performance management and future ship designs. Dominic is a member of the Performance Sports Engineering laboratory, working with the English Institute of Sport and British Swimming and has supervised research in sports ranging from sailing to Bob Skeleton. He is currently Head of the Maritime Engineering group and the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute. Dominic teaches in the areas of ship design, prediction of ship power requirements and hydrodynamics. 

Dominic obtained a first-class degree (BEng, 1994) in Ship Science from the University of Southampton. For his PhD studies, as a part-time student and Research Assistant, Dominic conducted research into the motions of high-speed catamarans – used as car and passenger ferries – in particular focusing on numerical predictions. He was awarded his PhD from the University of Southampton in 1999. 

In order to gain industrial experience to improve his teaching, Dominic spent a Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Secondment period working as a consultant naval architect with Three Quays Marine Services in London in 2003 and was appointed a Senior Lecturer in 2005. Dominic was Course Coordinator for the Ship Science degree courses from 2008-2011 and Director of Programmes from 2011-2013. He is a Chartered Engineer and member of both the Royal Institution of Naval Architects and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. 

With his research interests Dominic has been involved with both the International Ship and Offshore Structures Congress (ISSC) and the International Towing Tank Conference (ITTC). For the ISSC he was a member of the specialist committees for Very Large Floating Structures (2003-2006) and Sailing Yacht Design (2006-2009). For the ITTC he was a member of the committees on high-speed marine vehicles (2008-2011), seakeeping (2011-2014), performance of ships in service (2014-2017) and ships in operation at sea (2017-2021). 

Through his work at Southampton Dominic has spent periods as a visiting lecturer at Yokohama National University, Japan (2008) and visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2011-2016). From October-December 2013 and January-March 2016 he was a visiting research scientist with the Institute for High Performance Computing in Singapore as part of the IHPC-SMMI Joint laboratory in Maritime and Offshore Engineering. 

Since September 2014 Dominic is Shell Professor of Ship Safety and Efficiency at the University. The Centre for Maritime Futures was established in 2019 to reflect the broad and multidisciplinary research being undertaken across the University. This work focuses on future fuels for decarbonising shipping, increasing digitalisation of the maritime industry and improving crew and vessel safety.