The executive committee

The YorRobots executive committee consists of colleagues from across the University.

Keith Allen is based in the Philosophy Department at the University of York. He has research interests in philosophy of mind and the history of philosophy, with a particular focus on issues relating to colour and perception. His work includes A Naive Realist Theory of Colour (Oxford University Press, 2016).

He is Deputy Director of the Humanities Research Centre and co-Research Champion for the University’s Culture & Communication Research Theme.

Read Keith's research profile

Bryce is a marine ecologist and fisheries biologist whose work has ranged across temperate and tropical seas. He gained a BSc (Hons) in Zoology from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in Marine Biology from James Cook University before moving to the UK in 1999. The central goal of his research has been to better understand the factors regulating marine populations and communities, so as to ensure their conservation and sustainable utilisation.

He moved to the University of York in 2007. Since 2016 he has been particularly involved with assessing the potential effects of EU-Exit on UK fisheries and the marine environment, working with a wide range of stakeholders and advisers. He has also recently been collaborating with the School of Physics, Engineering and Technology at York to develop the use of Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles (ROVs) to survey marine ecosystems.

Read Bryce's research profile

Ana Cavalcanti is Professor of Software Verification at York and RAEng chair in Emerging Technologies working on 'Software Engineering for Robotics: modelling, validation, simulation, and testing'.

She held a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit award and a Royal Society Industry fellowship to work with QinetiQ in avionics. She has chaired the programme committee of several well-established international conferences, is on the editorial board of four international journals, and is chair of the Formal Methods Europe association.

She is, and has been, principal investigator on several large EPSRC grants. Her research is on theory and practice of verification and testing for robotics. She has published more than 150 papers.

Read Ana's research profile

Cade McCall, PhD, is a social psychologist in the Department of Psychology at the University of York.

His research focuses on human affect and social interactions. McCall specialises in the use of virtual environments, motion capture, and psychophysiology for studying psychological processes as they unfold in naturalistic settings.

Cade's recent work investigates the role of social cognition in driving and in interactions with autonomous vehicles.

Read Cade's research profile

Colleen Morgan is based in the Archaeology Department at the University of York. Her research is on digital media and archaeology, with a special focus on embodiment, avatars, genetics and bioarchaeology. She is interested in building archaeological narratives with emerging technology. Through archaeological making she explores past lifeways and our current understanding of heritage, especially regarding posthumanism and the cyborg, feminism, and interstitial spaces between past and present.

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Andy Tyrrell received a first-class honours degree in 1982 and a PhD in 1985 (Aston University), both in Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

He joined the Electronics department at the University of York in April 1990 and was promoted to the chair of Digital Electronics in 1998. His main research interests are in the design of biologically-inspired devices, architectures and systems, fault-tolerance, evolvable hardware and robotics. This work has included the creation of embryonic processing array, intrinsic evolvable hardware systems and the PAnDA hardware architecture.

He founded the Intelligent Systems research group at York in 1998, and is currently head of department. He co-founded and is CEO of the University spin-out company ngenics which focuses on applying bio-inspired computation to semiconductor designs. He has published over 350 papers in these areas.

He is a senior member of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IET.

Read Andy's research profile

Julie Wilson is a professor in Applied Statistics in the Department of Mathematics at the University of York.

Her research interests lie in the application of mathematical modelling and statistical methods, often applied to large biological and chemical data. She has extensive experience in chemometric method development and statistical pattern recognition, including multivariate analysis, classification and machine learning techniques. Current industrial collaborations involve Fera Science, AstraZeneca, Croda International, Eluceda and Paraytec.

Read Julie's research profile