People

Phil Purnell (PI) is Director of the University of Leeds “Cities” research theme and Professor of Materials and Structures in the School of Civil Engineering.

From a background in concrete technology, Phil’s research now concerns infrastructure systems; how we make them sustainable by minimising infrastructure’s impact on the environment, and how we can make them resilient by understanding how the environment impacts on infrastructure.

This includes research on the durability of composite materials, embodied carbon of structural elements, 3D printing, resource recovery from waste, the use of critical materials in low-carbon technology, non-destructive testing and new business models for infrastructure. This research has been funded by a £10M+ portfolio of grants from research councils, industry and government.

His interest in this project is three-fold; first, investigating how new materials (especially those based on novel cement systems) can be used in automated repair systems; secondly, how automation of mundane maintenance tasks will affect the jobs, health and wellbeing in the construction industry; and lastly, how automation can lead to better, more productive infrastructure systems.

Professor Rob Richardson is Director of the Leeds EPSRC National Facility for Innovative Robotic Systems, a world class, £4.3M facility for designing and creating robotic systems initiated in August 2013.

He is co-Director of the £8M EPSRC Cities Grand challenge that aims for Leeds to be the first city in the world to have its infrastructure fully maintained by robots by 2035.

He explored the Great Pyramid of Giza, Egypt using robotic technology and has discovered writing in the Great Pyramid that was hidden for thousands of years.

He is currently working on a broad range of funded research projects including robots to inspect and repair cities, robotic exoskeletons to enhance human strength, intelligent lower limb prosthetics and robotic archaeology.

Associate Professor in Infrastructure Engineering – University of Leeds

Honorary Lecturer – UCL

Dr Raul Fuentes is an Associate Professor in Infrastructure Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering and an Honorary Lecturer at UCL. He is a Co-Director in the project.

Before joining Leeds in 2014, Raul worked in industry for companies like Atkins, May Gurney and Arup where he gained substantial experience in the planning, design and delivery of civil engineering projects. In his research career, first at UCL, and subsequently at Leeds, he has had the opportunity to lead work in the areas of robotics, photogrammetry, laser scanning, fibre optics and BIM. After his arrival to Leeds he initiated the multi-Faculty collaboration with Prof Rob Richardson in the field of infrastructure robotics that eventually led to this project and the UKCRIC funding phase 2 funding for the National Facility in Infrastructure Robotics and Autonomous Systems (InfRAS, £10m).

He is a member of the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction and is currently the holder of a Royal Academy of Engineering / Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship for 2016/17 to work on a project called Developing infrastructure robotics.

Mark Miodownik is the UCL Professor of Materials & Society. He received his Ph.D in turbine jet engine alloys from Oxford University, and has worked as a materials engineer in the USA, Ireland and the UK.

His research include animate matter, smart materials, and novel manufacturing methods. The work is being carried out in collaboration with industry, hospitals and charities, funded through research grants from the BBSRC, EPSRC, NESTA, AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust and others.

He has published one book and more than a hundred research publications in a wide selection of journals eg. PNAS, Cell, Proc. Roy. Soc. For more than ten years he has championed materials research that links the arts and humanities to medicine, engineering and materials science. This culminated in the establishment of the UCL Institute of Making where he is Director and runs the research programme .

Prof Miodownik is a well known author and broadcaster. He regularly presents BBC TV programmes on engineering which have reached millions of viewers in more than 200 countries.

In 2013 he was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Rooke Medal, and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2014. He is author of Stuff Matters, a New York Times Best Selling book, which won the Royal Society Winton Prize in 2014 and the US National Academies Communication Award in 2015. In 2016 is was awarded the AAAS Public Engagement with Science Award.

Reader in Unmanned Air Vehicles

Dr. Stephen Prior has been working in the area of Field Robotics for the past 25 years. His research interest in autonomous systems relates to a shortlisted entry to the MoD Grand Challenge event in August 2008, where he led a team to design, make and test a novel unmanned aerial vehicle, which consisted of a patented Y6 arrangement. On the basis of this, he founded the Autonomous Systems Lab and has been researching with a small team of staff/students working on defence-related robotic technologies.

He is on the editorial board for the International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles and has published widely on the subject. Recent work involved the design and development of a series of Nanotechnology platforms, which were demonstrated and flown at the DSEi exhibition at the Excel Centre in London (September 2011), as well as developing the winning entry to the DARPA UAVForge challenge 2012.

During the last year he has been building a Tethered UAS solution for persistent stare capability.

Director, UKCRIC National Buried Infrastructure Facility

Chris Rogers, a Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Birmingham, has research interests embracing the installation and structural performance of buried infrastructure, utility service provision more generally, and future cities.

He leads the EPSRC-funded Mapping the Underworld programme, a £10million programme that is combining the outcomes from a variety of remote sensing technologies with utility records and data on the ground to enable the accurate location and mapping of the pipelines and cables buried beneath our streets. A new programme – Assessing the Underworld – is using the same technologies to assess the condition of the buried pipes and cables, the road structures that overlie them and the ground, which supports them both.

He is Deputy Director of iBUILD, a £3.5million consortium exploring infrastructure interdependencies and novel business models. This programme is exploring where value is realised from our infrastructure systems, whether social, environmental and/or economic, and how this value might be captured in new investment models.

He led two research consortia under EPSRC’s Sustainable Urban Environments programme – a study of the Birmingham Eastside urban regeneration programme to explore whether it met its sustainability aspirations and Urban Futures, which created a methodology to assess whether today’s city interventions are likely to be resilient to a changing context. The Urban Futures methodology is founds on extreme-yet-plausible scenario analysis. He leads the £6.3million Liveable Cities consortium, which is researching aspirational visions of the future in which movements towards meeting our low-carbon targets are married with resource security and citizen and societal wellbeing.

He is a member of the Lead Expert Group of the Foresight Future of Cities project and he Chairs the Institution of Civil Engineers’ Innovation & Research Panel.

Dr Mohamed Abdellatif is a research fellow at the University of Leeds who specialises in computer vision and robotic systems that can help in the automatic inspection and monitoring of structure health.

Prof. Muhammed Basheer holds the Chair in Structural Engineering in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds. He works on methods for assessing and improving the durability of concrete structures, including prediction of their service life.

Arpita Bhattacharjee is a research fellow at the University of Leeds working on the Self-Repairing Cities project. She is looking into potential future outcomes of robots replacing human labour and what that implies for the wider socio-economic landscape.

Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering

Dr Jordan Boyle is a lecturer in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds, and is also a founding member of the EPSRC National Facility for Innovative Robotic Systems, a £4.3M advanced robotics manufacturing facility.

He obtained his BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, before coming to Leeds for a PhD in Computational Neuroscience in the School of Computing.

Andrew Brown is a Professor of Economics and Political Economy at the University of Leeds. He researches key developments in economy and society, including job quality/satisfaction, wellbeing, infrastructure economics and ICT.

David Chapman is Professor of Geotechnical and Underground Engineering within the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Birmingham in the UK and a Chartered Civil Engineer.

He graduated with a 1st Class honours degree from Loughborough University in Civil Engineering and after a period working in consultancy, he returned to do a PhD at Loughborough, which he obtained in 1993. He was then appointed as a lecturer at the University of Nottingham, where he stayed for 6 years before moving to the University of Birmingham.

As part of the Balancing the Impact of City Infrastructure Engineering on Natural Systems using Robots project, he is involved with the work packages investigating the use of automated robots for assessing and repairing buried infrastructure.

His research interests relate to trenchless technology for installing and replacing pipelines and the interaction of structures with the ground, in particular the effect of tunnel construction on adjacent structures. As part of the EPSRC funded Assessing the Underworld project, he leads research investigating the relationships between the electrical properties of soils and their geotechnical properties. This is particularly important for understanding the use of geophysical techniques for locating and determining the condition of buried pipes. He is also involved with research to make buried pipelines smarter by using small-scale wireless sensors.

He is Technical Director of the National Buried Infrastructure Facility at the University of Birmingham, which is a key aspect of the UK Colabaratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities, a £138m government capital investment programme to create internationally leading research facilities in the UK.

Netta Cohen is a Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Leeds and an expert in neural and neurally-inspired control.

Cohen’s research lies at the interface of the physics, biology and engineering and combines biological experiments, computational modeling and biorobotic applications.

An EPSRC Leadership Fellow, she combines experiment and theory to construct whole-animal models of a microscopic roundworm (C. elegans), drawing lessons about the role of embodiment in dynamic control and mechanisms for adaptive, distributed and stochastic sensing and actuation. She hopes to apply lessons from this and other biological systems to concrete problems of sensory integration and decision making, navigation and task performance in robots.

Tony Cohn is Professor of Automated Reasoning in the School of Computing and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

His research mostly focusses on aspects of artificial intelligence and computing that involve spatial information. He has a particular interest in qualitative spatial/spatio-temporal reasoning, e.g. the well cited Region Connection Calculus (RCC).

His current research interests range from theoretical work on spatial calculi and spatial ontologies, to cognitive vision, activity recognition, robotics, modelling spatial information in the hippocampus, and integrating utility records and sensor data concerning the location of underground assets.

He has received substantial funding from a variety of sources including EPSRC, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), DARPA, the European Union and various industrial sources.

Work from the Cogvis project won the British Computer Society Machine Intelligence prize in 2004. The VAULT system based on the MTU and VISTA projects provides the world’s first real time delivery of integrated utility records nationwide and won the Built Environment category of the IET Innovation Awards in 2012 (also Highly commended in the IT category) and the 2012 NJUG Awards in the “Avoiding Damage” category.

Other current projects include Assessing the Underworld and an EU project, NetTUN, focussing on various aspects of tunnelling, and the STRANDS EU FP7 project in which Leeds leads the learning and activity recognition aspects.

Martin Dallimer is a Lecturer in Environmental Change at the Sustainability Research Institute (SRI) in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds.

His research focuses on applying monetary and non-monetary valuation techniques to biodiversity and ecosystem service provision, with a particular focus on cities and exploring the explicit links from value to ecosystem function.

Martin has also worked extensively on urban ecology and the role of land use, land use change and other human activities on the distribution of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

As part of this EPSRC Grand Challenges project, his work will centre primarily on exploring how alterations in pollution (noise, air, light) associated with automating cities with robots might impact biodiversity and urban ecosystem structure and function.

Professor of Bio-Mechatronics and Medical Robotics

Director of the University Centre for Mechatronics and Robotics and School Director of Postgraduate Research Studies

Leader of Bio-Mechatronics and Medical Robotics Research Group

Research Areas: Robotics, Bio-Mechatronics, Intelligent control, sensors and actuators for a wide range of applications using integrated system design approach where functional materials, sensors, actuators and control are brought together to develop intelligent systems/devices.

In these areas professor Dehghani has conducted research as principle investigator and co-investigator with total research income of ~ £15M, 11 RAs, 38 research students with over 100 publications.

His research focus is mobility and intelligent control in robots and also development of devices to support mobility in human patients and the growing aging population. It also extends to robotic systems for enhancing human capabilities for heavy duty tasks. His research also covers mobile robotics for other activities with the focus on locomotion and intelligent control.

A few project examples are listed here to give an overview of current research activities:

i) Design and development of a smart lower limb prosthetic system. Smart BioLeg: A Biomimetic, Self Tuning, Fully Adaptable Smart Lower Limb Prosthetics with Energy Recovery. In this project a smart prosthetic device is being developed to interact with the user and the environment.

ii) Design and Development of an Intelligent Modular Robotic Exoskeleton. The project covers both assistive and enhancive robotic exoskeletons to support a large spectrum of applications.

iii) Wearable Soft Robotics for Independent Living to support patients and the elderly.

iv) Balancing the impact of City Infrastructure Engineering on Natural systems using Robots. His role in this project is robots locomotion strategy.

v) Neuroprosthetics and Haptic feedback for amputees.
Project i, iii, and iv are funded by EPSRC

Gary Dymski is Professor and Chair in Applied Economics at the Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds.

He received his BA in urban studies from the University of Pennsylvania, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1975. He received a doctorate in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987. He was a member of the economics faculty at the University of Southern California from 1986 to 1991 before joining the UCR economics faculty in 1991.

Gary served as associate dean in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences in 2001-02 and was founding director of the Center for Sustainable Suburban Development in 2002-03. From 2003 to 2009, Gary was the founding Executive Director of the University of California Center, Sacramento, a UC-wide public policy center in California’s state capitol.

Gary has been a visiting scholar in universities and research centers in Brazil, Bangladesh, Japan, Korea, Great Britain, Greece, and India.

Gary has published numerous books, articles, chapters, and studies on banking, financial fragility, urban development, credit-market discrimination, the Latin American and Asian financial crises, exploitation, housing finance, the subprime lending crisis, financial regulation, the Eurozone crisis, and economic policy.

Mehran Eskandari Torbaghan is a research fellow on the Self-Repairing Cities project at the University of Birmingham, investigating the application of robotics and autonomous systems in managing infrastructure, including utilities and roads.

Gary Graham is an Associate Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management and a co-director of the Cities themed Design and Production Group. He is a visiting research scholar at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Centre for Transport and Logistics.

He founded and co-ordinates the Smart Cities and Economic Resilience Network (a membership of 60 international scholars, manufacturers, supply chain managers and community workers).

His work focuses on smart city manufacturing, productivity, localization, smaller companies and democratising the means of production. He has research collaboration on “Distributed Manufacturing” and “Industry 4.0” with the Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge.

Dr Richard Jackson is a Research Associate at the UCL Institute of Making, with his experimental work based at the laboratories of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He received his MSc (2002) in Physics from Durham University and PhD (2006) in Biomedical Nanotechnology from Newcastle University.

After a Postdoctoral position at Newcastle engineering intracortical microelectrodes for brain-machine interfaces, he worked for a spinout company from Imperial College London and the National Physical Laboratory developing next generation proteomic and genomic microfluidic devices.

Starting at UCL in 2013 his research now focuses on leading various efforts to design, fabricate and test various novel micro- and nano-structured composite smart active materials via advanced processing and manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing.

Bilal Kaddouh is a research fellow on the Self-Repairing Cities project at the University of Leeds, working particularly on autonomous drone flight. He has expertise in UAV control and mission management, and is designing aerial robotics systems for autonomous inspection and maintenance.

Jongrae Kim received PhD from Texas A&M University at College Station, Texas, USA, in Aerospace Engineering on the development of a new robust control design methodology to compensate for modelling errors in dynamical systems in 2002.

He developed an optimal path-planning algorithm for a group of Unmanned Air Vehicles funded by DARPA, USA, which solves an anisotropic optimisation problem and a hybrid algorithm for robustness analysis of aircraft flight clearance problems funded by EPSRC, which combines an global and a local optimisation algorithms to improve the convergence to an optimal solution.

He presented novel techniques for the robustness analysis of time-varying systems and stochastic systems, which are applied to study large-scale stochastic systems.

He participated in the UKube-1 project, which is a micro satellite integrated by Clyde Space Ltd. in Glasgow, UK, and the project was organised by the UK Space Agency. The satellite was launched in 2014 and successfully finished the most of major missions in 2015.

His current main research activities are focused on parallel sensor fusion and parallel algorithms to improve estimation accuracy for nonlinear systems. Instead of linearising the systems and applying heuristic estimation algorithms, the original nonlinear estimation problem is to be solved using a set of basis functions. The algorithm actively exploits the recent advances in the computational power and in miniaturised various sensors. The main applications of the algorithms are in the target tracking and the navigation problems in robotics.

Dr John Lones is a research fellow on Self-Repairing Cities, based in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds and working closely with Prof. Netta Cohen. He researches biologically inspired control systems, looking at emergent behaviour and adaptation to complex and dynamic environments.

Prof. Merat is an experimental psychologist and research group leader of the Safety and Technology Group, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds.

Her main research interests are in understanding the interaction of road users with new technologies. She applies this interest to studying factors such as driver distraction and driver impairment, and she is an expert in studying the human factors implications of highly automated vehicles.

She is currently involved in two main European Projects on automated vehicles. In the AdaptIVe project, she is studying drivers’ ability to resume control from automation in critical situations and investigating how this transition is achieved quickly and safely. For CityMobil2, Dr Merat is investigating pedestrians’ perceptions and views of fully automated low speed vehicles, which are currently under demonstration in a number of European Cities.

Dr Merat is Chair of the TRB sub-committee on Human Factors in Road Vehicle Automation, and on editorial board member of the European Transport Research Review and the newly established International Journal of Driving Science.

Nicole Metje is a Reader in Infrastructure Monitoring at the University of Birmingham in the Department of Engineering. Nicole is the Head of the Power and Infrastructure Research Group and the Deputy Director of the National Buried Infrastructure Facility in charge of sensors, which is part of the UK Collaboratorium for Research in Infrastructure and Cities.

Her research focuses on mapping and assessing the condition of buried utilities through smart sensors and surface geophysics, including quantum technology sensors such as gravity gradient. Furthermore, she focusses on determining the causes and costs of utility strikes and the direct and indirect costs of utility streetworks. Nicole works closely with industry to make impact and reduce utility strikes.

Nicole is a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers’ Municipal Expert and Geospatial Engineering Panels, the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors, the Utility Strike Avoidance Group Data Reporting Group, the TRB Utilities Committee and the ASCE Utility Standards committee for ASCE 38. She served on the British Standards Institution’s PAS128 (Specification for underground utility detection, verification and location) Steering Committee and is a current member of the PAS256 Steering Committee.

Professor Ian Robertson holds the University of Leeds Centenary Chair in Microwave and Millimetre-Wave Circuits and is Programme Manager for the Mechatronics and Robotics degree programmes.

He has published over 400 papers in the area of microwave engineering and was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2012 in recognition of his contributions to MMIC design and millimetre-wave system-in-package technology. These technologies have now become a core part of the wireless communications revolution and he is now applying “system-in-a-package” techniques to the design of miniature robots – particularly in the area of high frequency communications and sensing for applications such as exploration robotics and industrial sensing.

Nutapong Somjit received Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) from Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany, in 2005, and PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2012, all in electrical engineering.

In 2012, he was with the Chair for Circuit Design and Network Theory, Dresden University of Technology, where he led a research team in micro-sensors and MEMS ICs.

Since 2013 he is a university lecturer (assistant professor) in the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Leeds, United Kingdom. He is also appointed as a member of the Engineering, Physical and Space Science Research Panel of the British Council in 2014. His main research focuses on RFICs, RF MEMS, tunable antennas, and RFIC-MEMS integrations.

Dr. Somjit was the recipient of the Best Paper Award (EuMIC prize) presented at the European Microwave Week 2009, Rome, Italy, and the Honorable Mention in Student Paper Competition at the IEEE AP-S International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation 2012, Chicago, IL, USA. He was also awarded the IEEE Graduate Fellowship from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) in 2010 and 2011, and the IEEE Doctoral Research Award from the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S) in 2012.

He also serves as a reviewer for various international journals e.g. the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques (T-MTT). Since 2013 he is a member of the International Editorial Board of the International Journal of Applied Science and Technology. In 2016, he is the Chair of the Student Design Competition of the European Microwave Week, London, UK.