I am a Senior Lecturer in Robotics and Research Fellow with the Royal Academy of Engineering (2021-26), focused on swarm robotics for environmental monitoring. I have a background in complexity sciences and collective animal behaviour which I draw on for inspiration in my work.

Deploying swarms into the 'real world' is challenging, and my approach to solving this involves using smaller numbers of robots (e.g. 4-10) than one might usually think of as a 'swarm'. More sophisticated, ROS-based robots can navigate their environment effectively and coordinate with teammates. 

My group carries out experimental work in indoor environments on the university campus and in the city, and outside at locations such as the Bristol harbourside and Fenswood Farm, Long Ashton. I am affiliated with the Collective Dynamics research group with the School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology.

My current postdoctoral research associates are:

• Nicola Webb, part of the Human-Robot Satisficing Trust ('HuRST') project

My current PhD students are:

• Ning Zhou, co-supervised by Dr Nikolai Bode
• Adam Morris, co-supervised by Dr Timothy Pelham
• Connor York, co-supervised by Dr Paul O'Dowd
• Zachary Madin, co-supervised by Prof Jonathan Lawry
• Gjosse Zijlstra, co-supervised by Prof Karen Aplin
• Dawood Basharat, co-supervised by Prof Helmut Hauser

Former students:

• Dr James Ward, co-supervised by Prof Arthur Richards. Graduated 2026, with a thesis entitled "On the Design, Analysis, and Evaluation of Online Strategies for the Multi-Robot Patrolling Problem".

In 2017 I spent a year at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Department, working on animal social networks. I returned to Bristol as an EPSRC Doctoral Prize fellow and then a UK Intelligence Community fellow, before taking up my current RAEng fellowship. My PhD research was concerned with the exploration and decision-making behaviour of house-hunting Temnothorax ants, within the field of behavioural ecology and complexity sciences, as an EPSRC-funded PhD student. I was interested in how the behavioural interactions of individual worker ants allows collective problem-solving abilities to emerge. In between science degrees, I studied economics and worked in financial regulation (risk management). The theme of optimising risk-return trade-offs have been recurrent in my work with animal behaviour and robotics.