Biography
Simon Dobson is Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, and was Head of School from 2017 – 2021. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s national academy, in 2020, and serves as a science adviser to the Scottish government as a member of the Scottish Science Advisory Council
Simon works on complex and sensor systems, focusing on sensor analytics and the modelling of complex processes – and especially on the intersection of the two, which is sometimes called “digital twins”. His research has generated over 150 internationally peer-reviewed publications, driven by leadership roles in research grants worth over €30M – most recently as part of a £5M EPSRC-funded programme grant in the Science of Sensor Systems Software He has served, amongst other activities, on the steering committee of the ACSOS conference; as programme and general chairs for the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing; as an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems; as a member of the executive of UKCRC, the expert committee on UK computing research; as the chair of the BCS Distinguished PhD Dissertations award panel; and on the programme committees of a wide range of leading international conferences and specialised workshops. He was a director and vice-president of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics from 2006 – 2009, and has served on a number of national and EU committees and strategic initiatives.
Simon has previously worked at the UK STFC‘s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory; at Trinity College Dublin and UCD Dublin in Ireland; and was also the founder and CEO of Aurium, a research-led Dublin-based start-up company. He holds a BSc from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and DPhil from the University of York, both in computer science, is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.
Other personal stuff
Some of my photography appears here occasionally.