Electronics and Electrical Engineering

I was appointed as Head of the School of Engineering, and Professor of Tomographic Imaging, at the University of Edinburgh in 2013.

Having studied Physics as an undergraduate and PhD student at the University of Glasgow, I spent six and a half years working as a post-doctoral researcher in High Energy Particle Physics at Glasgow, Manchester, CERN (Geneva) and DESY (Hamburg).

In my ten years in R&D at the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, I worked in combustion and explosion hazards and lubricant formulation, and was the founding Group Leader of the specialist Engine Measurement group.

I was appointed Professor of Industrial Tomography at UMIST (later to become the University of Manchester) in 1996, becoming Head of Electrical & Electronic Engineering (1999-2002).

I chaired the UK Professors & Heads of Electrical Engineering (2003-2005).

For 3 years (2010-2013), I was Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Manchester.

I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2009.

I have taught most undergraduate year-groups, in measurements, errors, instrumentation electronics and a.c. circuit theory.

My research since 1996 has extended industrial tomography to provide specific chemical contrast in operating engineering plant, and developed electrical impedance tomography for medical applications, collaborating intensively with users in both academia and industry. Today, these topics continue to be my main research interests in Edinburgh, as part of the Agile Tomography research group within the Institute for Digital Communications.

• 1976 Bachelor of Science, 1st, University of Glasgow
• 1980 Doctor of Philosophy, PhD, University of Glasgow

• 1987 Chartered Physicist, CPhys
• 2000 Chartered Engineer, CEng
• 2009 Fellow of Royal Academy of Engineering, FREng

• Industrial Tomography
• Electrical Impedance Tomography

Alan Murray is Professor of Neural Electronics and Assistant Principal, Academic Support. He introduced the Pulse Stream method for analogue neural VLSI in 1985. Alan’s interests are now primarily in implanted silicon chips for biomedical applications.

He led the £5.2M IMPACT (Implantable Microsystems for Personalised And-Cancer Treatment) project, funded by an EPSRC Programme Grant and enjoys teaching first year engineering/electronics and third year Electromagnetics courses. IMPACT produced proof-of-concept results that will be taken forward in two areas – cancer and wound-healing, as "OPTIMIST" (Optimised, Personalised Treatment & Intervention: Microsystems, Implanted Sensors & Therapeutics).

Alan is a Fellow of IET, IEEE and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Principal Fellow of the HEA and has published over 360 academic papers. Alan’s degrees are in Physics (BSc and PhD – both from the University of Edinburgh). Subsequently, he has done this...

• 1978-80: Research Fellow, Solid – State Physics, Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories: supported by SERC NATO and Canadian NERC fellowships
• 1980-81: Research Fellow, Department of Physics, University of Edinburgh, leading the Light Scattering section of the Condensed Matter group
• 1981-84: VLSI Designer, Wolfson Microelectronics Institute
• 1984-91: Lecturer, Department of Electrical Engineering
• 1991-94: Reader, Department of Electrical Engineering
• 1994-present: Professor of Neural Electronics
• 2002-2008: Head of the Institute for Integrated Micro and Nano Systems
• 2008-2012: Head of the School of Engineering
• 2012-2015: Dean of Students, College of Science and Engineering
• 2015-2018: Head of the Institute for BioEngineering
• 2015-present: Assistant Principal, Academic Support

• B.Sc. Ph.D

• F.I.E.E., F.I.E.E.E., F.R.S.E., C.Eng., P.F.H.E.A.

• Fundamentals of Electronics, Electromagnetism,

• Outside interests : Music (especially folk music - writing, playing and listening) and wood-carving

http://www.optical-communications.eng.ed.ac.uk/

Wasiu O. Popoola is a Professor of Communications Engineering and the current Director of Electronics and Electrical Engineering. From 2019-2024, he was a Deputy Director of Learning and Teaching leading the School's initiatives on Widening Participation & Outreach. In 2022, he was awarded RAEng/Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for his work on ‘ethical LiFi’ research. He has published over 200 journal articles, conference papers, patent and several invited articles. He also co-authored the acclaimed book ‘Optical Wireless Communications: System and Channel Modeling with MATLAB’ and many other book chapters. His primary research interests are digital and optical communications, including VLC/LiFi, FSO, and fiber communications. One of his journal articles ranked No. 2 in terms of the number of full text downloads within IEEE Xplore, in 2008, from the hundreds of articles published by IET Optoelectronics, since 1980. Another article he co-authored with one of his Ph.D. students received the Best Poster Award at the 2016 IEEE ICSAE Conference. Popoola is a science communicator appearing in science festivals and on “BBC Radio 5live Science” programme in Oct. 2017. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Access Journal, a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering Technology (FIET), a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and a Senior Member of IEEE . He was an invited speaker at various events including the IET Lunch and Learn Lecture 2024, Rank Prize Symposium 2024, IEEE Photonics Society Summer Topicals 2016 among others.

• BSc (First Class Hons), MSc (Distinction), PhD

• Fellow Higher Education Academy (FHEA)
• Fellow IET (FIET)
• Senior Member IEEE
• Member IEEE Photonic Society

• Wireless Communication systems
• Optical Fibre Communications
• Free-Space Optical Communications
• Visible Light Communications

https://vios.science

Sotirios A. Tsaftaris is currently Chair (Full Professor) in Machine Learning and Computer Vision at the University of Edinburgh. He also holds the Canon Medical/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Healthcare AI. He is an ELLIS Fellow of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) of Edinburgh’s ELLIS Unit. Since 2023 he is a visiting researcher with Archimedes RC a research centre of excellence in AI in Athens, Greece. Between 2016 and 2023 he was a Turing Fellow with the Alan Turing Institute.

He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, in 2003 and 2006, respectively, and the Diploma degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2000.

Previously he was an Assistant Professor with IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy and the Director of the Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis Unit at IMT. Prior to that, he held a joint Research Assistant Professor appointment at Northwestern University with the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Radiology Feinberg School of Medicine. He maintained an adjunct appointment with EECS (2011-2015), and an affiliation with the Image and Video Processing Laboratory (IVPL), at Northwestern University.

He has published extensively, particularly in interdisciplinary fields, with more than 180 journal and conference papers in his active record, with a variety of co-authors and collaborators.

While he has served in many technical program committees of international conferences, and he actively reviews papers for several prestigious international journals, most notably he currently is an Associate Editor (AE) for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. He served as an AE for IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (2011-2021) and Elsevier DSP (2014-2018). He was tutorial chair for ECCV 2020. He was Doctoral Symposium Chair for IEEE ICIP 2018 (Athens). He has served as area chair for CVPR 2021, MICCAI 2018 (Granada), ICME 2018 (San Diego), ICCV 2017 (Venice), MMSP 2016 (Montreal), VCIP 2015 (Singapore). He has also co-organized workshops and tutorials for ECCV (2020, 2014), CVPR (2019), ICCV (2017), BMVC (2015), and MICCAI (2016, 2017, 2021).

He is a member of the IEEE, Senior Member, ISMRM, and SCMR.

His work has received several accolades, such as Best Paper Award (STACOM 2017), twice a Magna Cum Laude Award (ISMRM), a finalist for the Early Career Award (SCMR, 2011; SCMR, 2019 (Chartsias as PhD student)), and has had his work appear in journal covers and attract significant media coverage.

Prof. Tsaftaris is also a Murphy Fellow and a Fellow of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.

• 2000 - Diploma (5 year), Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), Electrical and Computer Engineering
• 2003 - MSc, Northwestern University (USA), Electrical and Computer Engineering
• 2006 - PhD, Northwestern University (USA), Electrical and Computer Engineering

• MSc Level Machine Learning for Signal Processing (2018-)
• MSc Level Advanced Concepts in Signal Processing (2016-2018)
• 3rd year undergraduate, Electromagnetics, Signals and Communications 3 (2017-2019)
• 3rd year undergraduate, Signals and Communications 3 (2015-2017)

• Medical Image Computing and Analysis
• Computer Vision and Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Applications in the natural and life sciences

https://practable.io

Prof Timothy Drysdale is the Chair of Technology Enhanced Science Education and Director of Strategic Digital Education in the School of Engineering. He is also seconded part-time to the University's Curriculum Transformation Project focusing on digital innovation for experiential learning.

His main research activity is in Engineering Education (Key Research Area 10 for the School), where he leads the Remote Laboratories group.

He and his team have developed an entirely new infrastructure and approach for operating online remote laboratories on traditional campuses (practable.io), winning international awards from the Global Online Laboratories Consortium (Remote Experiment Award 2024) and the Association for Learning Technology / Jisc Award for Digital Transformation in 2023.

Remote laboratories allow students to access real equipment, in real-time, from almost any location. The aesthetically-pleasing experiments are installed in the foyers of buildings, giving the campus a science-museum feel, with every square metre of foyer space saving 150 square metres of teaching laboratory space.

Practable.io experiments, infrastructure, and expertise are available via subscription, purchase, or consultancy through Edinburgh Innovations (contact Tim in the first instance).

Prior to 2018, he was a Senior Lecturer in Engineering at the Open University, where he was the founding director and lead developer of the £3M openEngineering Laboratory, their first large-scale real-time remote laboratory, which attracted awards has attracted educational awards from the Queen's Anniversary Prize (2024), Times Higher Education (Outstanding Digital Innovation, 2017), The Guardian (Teaching Excellence, 2018), Global Online Labs Consortium (Remote Experiment Award, 2018), and National Instruments (Engineering Impact Award for Education in Europe, Middle East, Asia Region 2018, and the overall Global Award in 2019).

His discipline background is in electronics and electromagnetics, including terahertz metamaterial design, surface wave antennas for cubesats and orbital angular momentum radio links. He is Associate Editor of the IET journal Microwave Antennas and Propagation.

• PGCert Academic Practice, University of Glasgow, 2007
• PhD Passive Devices for Terahertz Frequencies, University of Canterbury (NZ) 2004
• B.Eng (First Class, University Prize) in Electronics and Electrical Engineering, University of Canterbury (NZ) 1998

• Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• Member IEEE

Tim's Remote Laboratories Group provides remote experiments used on engineering courses ranging from 1st-5th year and up to 450 students in size.

• Non-Traditional Practical Work
• Remote laboratories
• Electromagnetics

Teaching Matters Blog:

• https://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/generative-artificial-intelligence-ban-or-embrace/
• https://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/assessment-feedback-and-their-digital-futures/
• https://www.teaching-matters-blog.ed.ac.uk/its-too-risky-to-play-it-safe-with-digital-innovation/

Appearances in the School News:

• https://www.eng.ed.ac.uk/about/news/20190527/professor-tim-drysdale-wins-global-award-teaching-remote-labs
• https://www.eng.ed.ac.uk/about/news/20181120/tim-drysdale-recognised-pioneering-remote-lab-teaching

After completing and access course with the Open University as a mature student I studied for my BSc(Hons) in Physics with Astrophysics at Nottingham Trent University. I continued my education and went on the gain a PhD Entitled “Voltage Programmable Liquid Optical Interfaces". After a short period as a fixed term lecturer I moved to an Industrial placement in the Hewlett Packard Displays Research Laboratory where I investigated the use of electro wetting in combination with liquid crystal displays. I was awarded an anniversary research fellowship at Northumbria University in 2013 and began research into surfaces and wetting with a particular interest in low contact angle hysteresis surfaces. In 2016 I became a senior lecturer at the same institution and in 2018 became the head of subject for Electrical Engineering. In July 2020 I became a Senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and moved my research into the Institute of Multiscale Thermofluids.

• BSc (Hons) Physics with Astrophysics
• PhD "Voltage Programmable Liquid Optical Interfaces

• Member of Istitute of Physics (IOP)
• Fellowship of the Higher Education Acadamy
• Member of the EPSRC College of Reviewers
• Commitee meber if IOP Pringting and Graphical Sciences Group

Engineering 1

PhD in Electrical Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and University of Edinburgh, 2023.

Título de Ingeniero Civil Electricista (Electrical Engineer), Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, 2016.

• Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)
• Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET)
• Next Generation Network (NGN) Member of CIGRE

• Power Conversion [4/MSc]