Early Career Forum
John Oyekan is a Lecturer in Digital Manufacturing and chartered engineer with 10+ years’ experience working in applied research and product development in industry and academia. He is experienced in working with multi-disciplinary teams to develop innovative computational intelligence algorithms for autonomous cyber-physical systems. He received a Ph.D degree in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering and a MSc Robotics and Embedded Systems from the University of Essex. He was an Engineer at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry developing software architectures and algorithms for Autonomous Systems and a Research Fellow at Cranfield University carrying out research in Manufacturing Informatics.
Maria Jose (Marisé) Galvez Trigo is a Lecturer/Assistant professor at the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University, where she is part of the Human-centred Computing (HCC) Research Section and its Subgroup in Computational and Human-centred Robotics. Marisé has a multi-disciplinary profile with a background in Computer Science, Engineering, and Human Factors. She is interested in robotics, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and applications of Machine Learning (ML) in those areas, with a strong focus on accessibility and direct co-research and co-design with end-users. You can learn more at: https://marisegalveztrigo.com
Efi Psomopoulou is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and a member of the Dexterous Robotics Lab and the Intelligent Systems Lab. Her main research interest is to investigate and control the physical interactions of robots with the environment in unstructured scenarios. She has worked on control of variable stiffness joint robots, haptic feedback during minimally invasive surgery, human-to-robot object handovers, stable grasping and in-hand manipulation. She is also a committee member of the IEEE RAS Women in Engineering. More information here: https://efipsom.github.io/
Wei Pan is a Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning, Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. He was an Assistant Professor in Robot Dynamics at the Department of Cognitive Robotics and co-director of Delft SELF AI Lab, TU Delft, Netherlands and a Project Leader at DJI, China. He is an area chair or associate editor of CoRL, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, ICRA, IROS, IET CSR and AAAI. He is a graduate of Imperial College London, University of Science and Technology of China and Harbin Institute of Technology.
Xin Dong is an Associate Professor in Engineering Design for Manufacturing at the University of Nottingham, where he is the robotics team lead of the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre in Manufacturing and On-wing Technology. His research focuses on continuum robots for inspection and repair in challenging environments, walking, and crawling soft robots for multimodal locomotion and manipulations in difficult-to-access spaces. In 2016, Xin received his PhD from the University of Nottingham on developing the world’s first snake robot for continuum robot for the in-situ repair of aeroengines. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Field robotics.
Yongjing Wang (CEng; BEng in Electronic/Electrical/Control Engineering; PhD in smart composite materials; Postdoc in applied robotics) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Birmingham. Wang is leading a research team on robotics and automation technologies for industrial sustainability. Wang is the Principal Investigator of an EPSRC New Investigator Award and high-TRL industrial projects. He is a Chartered Engineer with the Institution of Engineering and Technology and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.