Category: Engineering

Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Professor Tim Green has accepted the appointment as Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, with effect from 1 January 2025, for a term of five years. Professor Green will succeed Professor Eric Yeatman, who is taking up the post of Vice-Principal and Head of College of Science and Engineering at the University of Glasgow.

Professor Green joined Imperial in 1994 as Lecturer in the department and was promoted to Professor of Electrical Power Engineering in 2005. Professor Green is currently the Academic Lead for Sustainability and is also the Deputy Head of the Department, both of which he will step down from once he takes up the Head of the Department role. He has held several other senior roles such as Director of the Undergraduate Studies and Co-Director of the Energy Futures Lab (EFL).

Professor Green’s research focuses on the analysis and technology to develop a zero carbon electricity supply system that is dominated by variable renewable sources and other inverter-based resources (IBR) such as battery energy storage. He was awarded Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2018.

Head of the Department of Computing

Professor Alessandra Russo has accepted the appointment of Head of the Department of Computing, for a term of one year, with effect from 1 July 2024.  

This is to succeed our current Head of the Department, Professor Michael Huth, who is taking up a prestigious senior post at a University in Germany. 

Professor Russo joined Imperial as a PhD student of the Department of Computing in 1991 and became Research Associate in 1995. She was promoted to Professor of Applied Computational Logic in 2016. Professor Russo has held several senior roles within the Department of Computing, including Director of Postgraduate Research and Deputy Head of the Department since 2020. 

Professor Russo’s main research areas are in Computational Logic, Symbolic Machine Learning, Probabilistic and Distributed Inference, and their applications to Intelligent Adaptive Systems, Security, Network Management, Distributed Control Systems for Sensor Networks, and System Biology.

Acting Head of the Department of Earth Science and Engineering

Professor Gareth Collins has accepted the role of Acting Head of Department of Earth Science and Engineering between the period of 1 November 2023 and 28 February 2024.  This is to provide cover for the current Head of the Department, Professor Tina van De Flierdt, while she will be away conducting fieldwork in the Antarctic.

Professor Collins joined Imperial in 2004 as a Research Fellow, after obtaining his PhD in Geology from Imperial in 2002. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer (2011), Reader (2014) and to Professor of Planetary Science in 2018.

Gareth’s research explores the many consequences of collisions in the solar system through the development and application of numerical impact models. Major research contributions include studies of the formation of the Chicxulub impact crater and its role in the K-Pg mass extinction, as well as the formation of many other craters on Earth, the Moon and the role of collisions in the early solar system. He was a co-investigator on the NASA-led InSight mission to Mars and on the Science Investigations Teams of NASA’s DART mission and ESA’s Hera mission.

Vice-Dean (Research), Faculty of Engineering

Professor Julie McCann has accepted appointment as Vice-Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Engineering with effect from 1 October 2022, for a term of office of five years. Professor McCann is currently Interim Vice-Dean (Research), a role she has held since 1 October 2021.  

Professor McCann joined the College in 2001 as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing. She was promoted to Professor of Computer Systems in 2014.  

Professor McCann will continue in her roles as Faculty Ambassador for Academic Women, Deputy Director of the UK Petras Centre for Excellence for Internet of Things Systems Cybersecurity, and theme lead for Data Centric Engineering at the Alan Turing Institute.

Professor McCann’s research interests include the behaviours and optimisation of Wireless Sensor Networks, Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems. She was awarded the RCUK Suffrage Science Award for Maths and Computing in 2018. 

Head of the Department of Aeronautics

Professor Spencer Sherwin has accepted appointment as Head of the Department of Aeronautics with effect from 1 October 2022, for a period of three years, in succession to Professor Paul Robinson. 

Professor Sherwin joined Imperial in 1995 as Lecturer in the Department of Aeronautics and was promoted to Professor of Computational Fluid Mechanics in 2005. He is currently the Director of the Research Computing Service on a fixed-term basis which ends in September 2022.  

Professor Sherwin’s research focuses on the development and application of parallel spectral/hp element methods for solving partial differential equations. Through open source software his group performs direct numerical simulation, implicit large eddy simulation and stability analysis on a range of problems of relevance to aeronautics, biomedical flows, offshore engineering and vehicle aerodynamics.