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Professor Jon Timmis  BSc (Hons), PGCHE, Ph.D., Senior MIEEE

Visiting Professor 

Professor of Intelligent and Adaptive Systems

Email: jon.timmis@york.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1904 32 2318
Fax: +44 (0)1904 32 2335

Research Area: Intelligent Systems and Robotics Group

Areas of Expertise: Artificial Immune Systems, Computational Immunology, Fault-Tolerant Swarm Robotic Systems.

Biography

I am a Visiting Professor in Intelligent and Adaptive Systems and I am a member of the Intelligent Systems and Nano-science group. My day job is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Commercial) at the University of Sunderland. I worked at the University of York for 14 years until May 2019, and I still run an active research lab at York in collaboration with a number of colleagues in the Department.

My research cuts across many areas, but most of my work revolves around immunology, either developing computational models of immune function (computational immunology), or fault-tolerance achieved via bio-inspired engineering with a focus on the immune system (immuno-engineering). In terms of applications, I focus mainly on swarm robotic systems as a platform for testing ideas relating to fault tolerance and anomaly detection. My wider interests are in modelling and simulation of complex systems.

I studied Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science, Aberystwyth University and studied for my PhD in the same department in the area of artificial immune systems. I moved to the University of Kent in 2000 as a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer at the School of Computing at the University of Kent. I moved to York in 2005 to take up a position of Reader in a joint appointment between the Departments of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. In 2008, I was promoted to Professor (personal chair) and from August 2013 I was full-time in the Department of Electronic Engineering. I was Head of Department from 2015 to 2017 and then Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Partnerships and Knowledge Exchange) from 2017 to 2019.

I held a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award (April 2011 to March 2016) which allowed me to focus on developing my work on computational immunology and self-healing swarm robotic systems. For fun, we made a video, of our flying robots (make sure the volume is turned up).  

I was a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellow (March 2014 - September 2015) which allowed me time to commercialise our work on supporting evidence-based decision-making through computational modelling.  We spun out a company, SimOmics, in 2014, and I served as CEO for four years and now serve as Chairman.

View my profile on Research Gate or my profile on Google Scholar. For those of you interested in statistics, I have over 14,000 citations and a H-index of 53 (Google Scholar).