She was Head of the Department of Engineering 2009-14 and has held visiting posts at MIT (Jerome C Hunsaker Visiting Professor, 1999) and at Caltech (Moore Distinguished Scholar 2001). Ann was appointed CBE for services to Mechanical Engineering in 2002, DBE for services to Science in 2007, and was appointed to the Order of Merit by the Queen in December 2015.

Professor Dowling's research aims to enable society to have power and transport without environmental damage or excessive noise. There are two main themes, one associated with efficient, low-emission combustion, and the second with understanding, modelling and reducing the noise from cars, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and domestic appliances such as vacuum cleaners and fans. The drive for low emissions is causing aero and industrial gas turbine combustors to operate on the verge of instability. Ann Dowling's research is aimed at understanding this phenomenon and involves theoretical modelling, computations and experiments. Her team develop techniques predict the onset, frequency and limit cycle amplitudes of the self-excited oscillations that are the result of the instabilities. Both passive and active means of control are investigated, and various successful approaches have been demonstrated. Ann Dowling's research on aircraft noise is concentrating particularly on jet noise, a major noise source at take-off. Her group is developing models to predict the noise and investigate and optimise various mitigation techniques. They are also investigating combustion noise, which is of increasing importance in the external noise from aircraft. Techniques are being developed to reduce noise in a wide range of applications.