06 Jul 2026
New academic appointments and awards at the Department of Engineering Science
Academic appointments, Associate Professor conferments and internal appointments of Departmental Lecturers
L to R: Digby Chappell, Thomas Okell, Qi Hu, Mihai Badiu, Jonathan Knappett
A number of academic appointments have been made at the Department in the last six months:
Digby Chappell is an Associate Professor in Engineering Science, a member of the Oxford Robotics Institute, and a Tutorial Fellow at St Anne's College. He leads the Human Enhancing and Augmenting Technology (HEAT) Lab, with a goal of creating body-interfacing robots and technology that restore, improve, and even transform human abilities.
Jonathan Knappett joined the University of Oxford in 2026 as Professor of Engineering Science in Geotechnical Engineering and a Tutorial Fellow at Brasenose College. Jonathan’s research focusses on the creation of infrastructure that is resilient to dynamic environmental actions, including earthquakes, extreme weather and offshore loading.
Thomas Okell is an Associate Professor based at the Podium Institute within the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, with a joint appointment at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences. His role focusses on the use of advanced neuroimaging methods to explore relationships between sports, injuries, mental health and cognition.
Internal appointments of Departmental Lecturers:
Qi Hu was an undergraduate and postgraduate Engineering student at Oxford. She was elected to a Schmidt AI in Science fellow and an associate research fellow at Reuben College in 2023 and a Departmental Lecturer in Photonics in 2025. Her work focuses on integrating AI techniques into optical hardware control to develop next-generation imaging systems.
Mihai Badiu is a Departmental Lecturer and Stipendiary Lecturer in Engineering Science at Balliol College, where he teaches tutorials on various topics in mathematics and electrical engineering. Mihai's general research interests are in information and communication theory, random graphs, signal processing for communications, and probabilistic modelling & inference.
Associate Professor Titles were conferred upon the following:
