BIEI Academic Professors
Learn more about our staff and the research they're working on to improve our industrial engagement.
Professor Francesco Pomponi
Professor Francesco Pomponi has a portfolio of appointments, all linked to enabling and effecting sustainability at scale in the built environment. He is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Preoptima, an AI startup offering whole life carbon assessments in real time for design optioneering at the earliest possible stage.
Also he served as founding Managing Director of the Open Data for Climate initiative (ODCi), a philanthropically funded global effort to develop carbon footprint data for materials and geographies that don’t have any. Professor Pomponi has retained active links with academia as Visiting Professor at Edinburgh Napier University, Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, and Senior Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership.
He looks forward to engaging with the University’s research community, in order to identify opportunities for joint work in areas linked to continuing professional development, and knowledge transfer partnership, and joint bidding for research funding that has an industrial and/or societal angle to maximise impact and policy relevance.
Professor Jason Snape
Jason has joined the University of York from AstraZeneca, a global biopharmaceutical company, where he was the Global Head of Environmental Protection. Throughout his research career, Jason has sponsored and supervised many PhD and postdoctorate early career scientists, to help support evidence-based environmental legislation. Jason fosters collaborative research built on trust between business, industry, government agencies and third sector organisations to drive sustainable innovation at a ‘systems level’ to demonstrate social, economic and environmental value.
As well as driving industry best practice, Jason’s research has shaped the regulatory guidance adopted by the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA). Jason is delighted to have joined the Department of Environment and Geography as a Research Professor and will partner with colleagues within that department and across the wider university to drive public good. Jason’s research will focus on sustainable healthcare and developing predictive tools to identify and manage chemical risks to society and the environment.
Professor Simon Burton - Department of Computer Science
Simon currently holds the role of Chair of Systems Safety, which is one of the newly created BIEI professorships, he is also business director for the Centre for Assuring Autonomy. Simon’s research explores the intersection of systems safety engineering, artificial intelligence and the legal, ethical and regulatory considerations necessary to form convincing arguments for the safety of complex, autonomous systems.
Professor Simon Burton’s ties with the University start back to his degree in Computer Science in 1992. After a short period developing telecommunications software, Simon returned to York as a research associate within the High Integrity Systems Engineering Group and completed his PhD. Simon then spent several decades working in Germany, for companies DaimlerChrysler (Mercedes) and Bosch. Most recently, Simon was the scientific director for safety assurance at the Fraunhofer Institute of Cognitive Systems in Munich.
The BIEI position appealed to Simon, as he has always enjoyed working at the interface between research and industry. He is looking forward to supporting the University in exploring new ways to engage with industry and ensure that results of our world-leading research finds their way into everyday life. This will involve helping the newly established Centre for Assuring Autonomy, a collaboration between Lloyd's Register Foundation and the University of York, to grow into a successful and self-sustaining research partner for industry and policymakers. With strong ties to both the UK and Europe, he will also look to strengthen our relationships to international businesses and research partners.
Dr Stephen Hall - Department of Environment and Geography and School of Business and Society.
Stephen is delighted to be taking up a position at the University of York and especially keen to deliver on the promise of a University for public good. Stephen is a political economist, which means he cares about how we run sociotechnical systems like energy. In Stephen’s academic work, he argued the energy system needs real transformation to meet the needs of ordinary people and the planet.
Theoretically, he is interested in the founding principles of neoliberal economics, and how they have severely limited our collective imagination about how things could be done better. Practically, Stephen has pointed these questions at energy innovation and climate action. Stephen has recently spent two years as Head of Awards for Ashden, finding the most inspirational climate solutions from across the UK and Global South.
Stephen is joining the University of York as a joint appointment between the Department of Environment and Geography and the School of Business and Society. As a Senior Fellow in Business and Industry, he will be designing research projects that challenge energy utilities and energy system actors to innovate faster. He believes that universities have a vital role to play in transforming how we think about and relate to the climate and ecological emergencies.
Dr Matthew Reilly - Department of Biology
Matt is a bioprocess engineer with a background in industrial anaerobic digestion and fermentation. This journey started with an undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of York, an industrial placement at Thames Water’s R&D department sparked an interest in industrial-scale microbiology for the conversion of wastes to valuable products. This led him to pursue a PhD at the University of South Wales, focusing on the anaerobic conversion of wheat straw and sewage to biohydrogen and biomethane fuels.
After his PhD, Matt completed an industrially supported postdoctoral position at Harper Adams University. He was then awarded an EPSRC Innovation Fellowship and relocated to the Department of Biology’s Centre of Excellence for Anaerobic Digestion (CEAD) at the University of York in late 2019.
This fellowship targeted exploitation of anaerobic gut fungi, native to ruminant herbivores, for their ability to rapidly convert cereal straws into industrially valuable products such as biogas and organic acids. Since returning to the University, Matt has received funding for research projects which have included interactions with a range of industrial companies. As a BIEI Fellow based in CEAD, Matt is excited to build and strengthen links between the university and industrial partners in the agricultural and water treatment sectors. His vision is to deliver impactful solutions by leveraging his expertise in industrial biotechnology processes and microbial communities to address global challenges in waste management and resource recovery.
Dr Pragna Das - Institute for Safe Autonomy
Pragna Das is a robotics researcher and innovator working on the conjunction of AI and robotics. Her latest project was TechnioSpring Industry (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Grant) for product innovation and research in perception and navigation in unknown environments. Her expertise lies in fleet management, planning and coordination for Automated Ground Vehicles (AGVs) and Automated Mobile Robots (AMRs).
The journey in robotics started with Master of Engineering from IIEST (erstwhile BESU), Kolkata, India. With strong motivation to explore the world of robotics, she pursued her PhD in multi-robot systems from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in 2018. She obtained experience in navigation with unseen environments with dynamic obstacles, perception of the environment using sensors and sensor fusion, robot inspection in unseen environment, camera based perception with arms manipulators and dual arms through her works in RAIN Hub project and Eurofusion Project during her time at RACE, UKAEA.
Joining the Institute of Safe Autonomy is another new milestone in her career. She will be working on many ongoing research projects in the group with an objective of making them industrially relatable, to enhance the projects towards meeting industrial needs.
Dr Jessica Wormold - Forensic Speech Science
Most recently, Jessica has been working as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ESRC-funded person-specific automatic speaker recognition project in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science. This project focuses on the use of automatic speaker recognition systems in forensic speaker comparison and what makes particular voices easy or difficult for systems to recognise. Prior to this, Jessica worked for six years as a speech science consultant at J P French Associates, where she specialised in speaker comparison and transcription.
During this time, she was involved in over 450 cases and gave oral testimony in UK courts six times. Jessica’s new role as lead on the upcoming PACE funded project ‘Towards the growth of forensic speech science’, will enable her to bring together her experience of practice and research in forensic speech science to further cement York's position as a world leader in this area.
