Ben Fourcin

PhD student

Ben achieved a distinction for a MEng in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Exeter (2014 - 2018). His masters project was on the topic Natural Ventilation in Buildings, he created a novel simplified building energy model to predict transient temperature change in a room.

Before starting the studentship he spent one year working in industry, performing whole building energy simulation services for a range of non-domestic buildings.

Ben's interests include: Machine Learning, Nonlinear Optimisation, Data-centric Energy Modelling

Professor Tim Dodwell

Professor of Computational Mechanics and Turing AI Fellow 

Professor Tim Dodwell holds a personal chair in Computational Mechanics which straddles the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Institute of Data Science and AI at the University of Exeter.

He currently holds a prestigious 5 year Turing AI Fellowship with the Alan Turing Institute and is the Romberg Visiting Professorship at Heidelberg in Scientific Computing. Externally he is on the editorial board for Proceedings of Royal Society London A, SIAM Journal of Uncertainty Quantification. His research lies in Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification, Digital Twins, Multiscale Modelling and Scientific Computing, and actively works across various sectors including high value manufacturing, aerospace, air traffic control and construction.

Dr. Grigorios Mingas

Senior Research Data Scientis

Grigorios is a Senior Research Data Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute. He is passionate about using data science to help solve difficult societal problems. He received his PhD from Imperial College London, where he co-designed MCMC algorithms and specialised hardware (FPGAs) to accelerate large-scale Bayesian inference.

His research focused particularly on the accuracy and performance of MCMC algorithms under custom arithmetic precision regimes. He was also involved in a side-project where he used GPUs to accelerate variable selection in genome-wide association studies.

Dr. Hussein Rappel

Lecturer in Computational Engineering

Dr. Rappel is a Lecturer in Computational Engineering in the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences. He did his Ph.D. in computational sciences at the University of Luxembourg as a member of the Legato Team and the University of Liege (Belgium)  as a member of Computational & Multi-scale Mechanics of Materials (CM3) unit. Before joining the University of Exeter, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Alan Turing Institute and Computational Statistics and Machine Learning Group (CSML) at the University of Cambridge.

He is interested in numerical analysis and probabilistic modeling.  A list of his publications can be found here. 

Joanna Bennett

PHD STUDENT

Joanna Bennett is currently working towards her PhD at the University of Exeter, as a member of the Datacentric Engineering Group.

Joanna undertook a Masters' Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Exeter, graduating in 2007. After this, she spent 10 years working in industry, first with Crane Fluid Systems in Ipswich, designing and assisting with the manufacture of industrial valves; then with Goodridge Ltd, a producer of automotive fluid systems. In the latter role, she took on much of the technical work of the office, conducting research projects and providing in-house training.

In 2017 she began her PhD, funded by GKN. This project aims to create a viable computational model of the material behaviour of composites during manufacture. She now works part-time, so she can spend the rest of her time with a very active toddler!

dr. Peidong Mei

research fellow

Dr Peidong Mei is a Research Fellow in Human-Computer Interaction at the Turing and Exeter University. She obtained her PhD in Psychology titled ‘Social Processes in Young Children’s Developing Understanding of Fairness’ and supervised by Prof. Charlie Lewis at Lancaster University. 

Her research interests generally lie in social processes and development, moral understanding and decision making and the application of various research methods and technologies in social dynamics. At Turing, she is keen to improve human-AI collaboration from a social science perspective.

Dr. Michael Gibson

Research Fellow

Mike graduated his degree in Computer Science from the University of Exeter in 2011, where he investigated Genetic Algorithm (GA) methods for tackling the traveling salesman problem. He completed his PhD in Computer Science in 2015 also from the University of Exeter, where he investigated the use of Genetic Programming (GP) for the creation of Cellular Automata (CA) state transition rules. This work investigated the GPCA method’s use for theoretical CA such as the Game of Life, and also for Real-world systems, specifically Urban flood modelling. In his thesis, he also investigated the use of highly parallel hardware in multi-core CPU and many-core GPU, using the OpenMP and OpenCL API's respectively.

DR Nikolaos Papadimas

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Nick obtain his BSc in Mathematics from the University of Ioannina and his MSc in Applied Mathematics from NTUA (National Technical University of Athens), in the dissertation he worked in modeling a cancer treatment named ”Hyperthermia-Treatment” in close collaboration with Microwaves and Optics Laboratory of NTUA.

Dr Mikkel Bue Lykkegaard

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Mikkel Bue Lykkegaard is a Graduate Research Assistant in Prof. Tim  Dodwell’s  Data  Centric  Engineering Group at University of Exeter. In that respect, he is on a short hiatus from his PhD fellowship with the Water Science and Engineering Centre for Doctoral Training (WISE CDT), which Prof. Tim Dodwell is co-supervising with Dr. David Moxey. Mikkel’s research is mainly concerned with hydrogeological inversion and uncertainty quantification – or the art of managing groundwater ressources using sparse and uncertain data. Apart fom his academic research, Mikkel administers the Data Centric Engineering Group’s GPU-powered HPC computer ‘Hydra’, which is employed for various compute-intense tasks in the group.

Dr. Konstantinos Agathos

Lecturer in Computational mechanics

Dr Konstantinos is a Lecturer in Computational Mechanics in the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences. He studied civil engineering in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) where he also obtained his PhD. He continued his research as a post-doctoral researcher in the University of Luxembourg, while prior to joining the University of Exeter, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the group of Structural Mechanics and Monitoring at ETH Zurich (Switzerland), as part of a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship.

His research focuses on the development of methods for the computational modelling of fracture, and more recently on the combination of such methods with data-driven techniques towards the realisation of the concept of "digital twins". Some specific topics of interest include the modelling of non-planar crack propagation using enriched finite element methods, the development of reduced order models for cracked solids and structures, as well as their application to crack detection problems.

Dr. George De Ath

 POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW

George is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter.

He obtained a first-class degree in MSci Computer Science and mathematics at Exeter in 2015 before going on to complete a PhD in computer Science there. Before starting in the DCE group, he was a Research Fellow on a UKRI project titled "Rapid Calibration of operational and Strategic Digital Twins" with Prof. Richard Everson and Prof. Jonathan Fieldsend.

His research interests include optimisation and machine learning, with a particular interest in Bayesian optimisation and Gaussian processes.

Dr. Anhad Sandhu

CEO and co-founder of Digilab

Dr. Anhad Sandhu is the CEO of a spin-out tech company called Digilab. Prior to his current role, he was a research fellow in the Data Centric Engineering Group at Exeter. He obtained a PhD in Applied Mathematics titled Multiscale methods for random composite materials supervised by Prof. Timothy Dodwell. During this time he contributed to the development of a high performance computational package for solving large scale, strongly anisotropic problems. He also modelled the effect of defects on the strength on composite components as part of an industrial case study with GKN Aerospce.

Previously, he graduated with an MEng degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Bath. His interests lie in statistics, uncertainty quantification and high performance computing. He is also keen to get involved with more AI based projects.

Dr. Louise Kimpton

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW

Dr Louise Kimpton is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Data Centric Engineering Group at the University of Exeter, under the supervision of Professor Tim Dodwell.

Louise obtained her MMath degree in Mathematics with first-class honours at the University of Exeter in 2016. She then continued to study a PhD in mathematics at Exeter under the supervision of Peter Challenor and Danny Williamson. Her thesis was submitted in April 2020, entitled “Uncertainty Quantification for Numerical Models with Two Regions of Solution”.

Yu Bi

Exeter/Turing Postdoctoral Research Associate

Yu Bi received the B.Sc. degree from Beijing Jiaotong University, China, in 2015, and the M.Sc. degree of Communication Networks and Single Processing from University of Bristol, United Kingdom, in 2017. She is currently a research assistant for machine learning control at the Alan Turing Institute and is pursuing the PhD degree at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. Her research interests include Network Optimisation, Reinforcement Learning, and Game Theory.

Nick Pepper

Exeter/Turing Postdoctoral Research Associate

Nick Pepper read Physics at the University of Oxford before obtaining an MSc in Aeronautics at Imperial College London.

In 2017 Nick started an iCASE PhD Studentship in the UQLab at Imperial College, supervised by Prof Francesco Montomoli. His research, co-sponsored by the EPSRC and Airbus, focussed on developing Machine Learning based methods for accelerating the design process of aeronautical components.

More recently, Nick was seconded to the NASA Langley Research Centre where he developed a novel Adaptive Learning algorithm for reliability analysis.

Ben Carvell

PhD student

Ben studied a Masters in Astrophysics at Durham University, graduating in 2008. Following this he moved to industry to work at NATS, the main provider of air traffic control for the UK, where he has worked on a variety of research projects with a focus on the development of decision automation and support systems.

More recently, Ben has been involved in the inception of Project Bluebird, a collaboration between NATS and The Alan Turing Institute to deliver the world’s first AI system to control a section of airspace in live trials. As part of the work of this project, Ben is now working towards his PhD under the supervision of Professor Tim Dodwell, the Principal Investigator for the collaboration.

Jan Povala

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Jan is a post-doctoral researcher at the Alan Turing Institute working on machine learning methods for air traffic control. His interests are computational statistics, spatio-temporal modelling, and PDE-based models. He holds a PhD in Statistics from Imperial.

Prior to his PhD, he obtained a computing degree (also at Imperial) and worked as a software engineer at Amazon for two years.

Liza Cheshire 

 RESEARCH MANAGER

Originally based in London, Liza’s career has spanned fashion, housing and architecture; where she managed the offices and support staff at award winning practices Jamie Fobert Architects and DSDHA.

After moving to the South West, she worked in a variety of roles at the University of Exeter including Executive Assistant in HASS Faculty Operations, Research Project Co-ordinator for HQMH (Hub for Quantative Modelling in Healthcare) and Research Administrator for CBMA & TREE  (Centre for Biomedical Modelling and Analysis and Translational Research Exchange at Exeter). She moved to the Engineering Department in March 2023, where she supports the Data Centric Engineering (DCE) group as Research Manager.

Alessandra Vizzaccaro

 Research Fellow

Alessandra obtained her PhD in 2021 at Imperial College London, sponsored by Rolls Royce PLC, in computational nonlinear dynamics, with focus on vibration in aircraft engines. Later, she joined the University of Bristol as a Research Associate in Engineering Mathematics under the DigiTwin programme grant, where she developed new experimental techniques for digital twins. She is now a Research Fellow in the Data Centric Engineering group at the University of Exeter, working with Prof. Tim Dodwell on probabilistic model order reduction.

Her research lives at the intersection between applied mathematics and engineering and aims at developing novel tools to address real-world industrial challenges. Her major contribution is in the field of dimensionality reduction of large-scale numerical models, with application ranging from aerospace structures to MEMS devices. In her current role, she is working on novel statistical techniques for building low order probabilistic models from high dimensional data.