New academics at the Department of Engineering Science

Professor Lucia Corsini joined the Department in November 2024 as Associate Professor in Engineering Entrepreneurship. Lucia’s research is focussed on Circular Economy and Sustainability. She leads the Circular Electrical and Electronics Project which seeks to enable a low-carbon Circular Economy for Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) that reduces the mining of rare, expensive and critical minerals. To date, Lucia has been awarded over £2.8m in research funding from UKRI, EPSRC, ESRC and other funding bodies. In addition to her prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (£1.56m), she was awarded a ESRC New Investigator Award (£249k) for her research on Circular Economy. Before moving to Oxford, Lucia was a Reader in Product Design Engineering at Brunel University London. Previously, she was a Research Associate and EPSRC DTP Fellow at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge; and a Research Assistant at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Professor Antonio Elia Forte joined the University of Oxford as Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Tutorial Fellow at Pembroke College in September 2025. He completed his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London in 2015 on the mechanics of soft materials and interfaces, followed by a postdoctoral position in Bioengineering at Imperial investigating how the brain perceives sound and speech through computational and experimental neuroscience. He was subsequently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Harvard University in the group of Professor Katia Bertoldi, and in 2021 joined King’s College London, where he later became Associate Professor. His research explores the mechanics, design, and behaviour of soft robotic systems and reconfigurable metamaterials, with applications from adaptive structures to bio-inspired machines. Antonio co-founded The Weird Gripper Company (TWGC), holds three patents, and served as organiser and chair of three sessions at the APS Global Summit that later became an independent meeting, the Functionality Through Nonlinearity (FTN) Conference. He leads the Reconfigurable and Adaptive Designs Lab (RADlab) and holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship on neural-driven, active, and reconfigurable mechanical metamaterials.

Professor Jean-Baptiste Lugagne joined the Department of Engineering Science in December 2024 as a Departmental Lecturer, before being promoted to Associate Professor in Engineering Science (Control Group) and Tutorial Fellow at Worcester College in September 2025. He leads a research programme at the interface of synthetic biology, control theory, and machine learning. His work combines microfluidics, optogenetics, and data-driven control to develop real-time cell-machine interfaces for studying and optimising microbial processes in clinical and biomanufacturing contexts. Prior to joining Oxford, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University, working on real-time control of gene expression to study antibiotic resistance, and obtained his PhD from Université Sorbonne Paris Cité in 2016.

Dr Sarah Thomas joined the department in January 2025 as an Associate Professor and a Tutorial Fellow at Balliol College. Her research focuses on photonic quantum technologies and the development of devices for quantum networks. Sarah completed her PhD in the physics department in Oxford, focusing on the development of optical quantum memories, which are key devices for the scalability of optical quantum technologies. Sarah was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Paris, working on quantum dot based single-photon sources and their applications in photonic quantum technologies. In 2022 Sarah was awarded an Imperial College Research Fellowship and worked on interfacing quantum dot single photon sources with atomic quantum memories for applications in future quantum networks.

Professor Johannes Weickenmeier is an Associate Professor of Brain Health in the Department of Engineering Science and a Fellow of St. Cross College since 2024. He is part of the Podium Institute and leads the efforts on Brain Health. He obtained his PhD from the ETH Zurich in 2015 and trained as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University for three years. He then joined Stevens Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering from 2018-2024. His area of expertise is the design of theoretical and computational models to simulate and predict the multiphysics behaviour of living systems with a particular focus on the brain. His group aims to understand the most prevalent damage mechanisms associated with healthy aging, neurodegenerative, and traumatic brain injury with the goal to facilitate early diagnosis of abnormal brain changes. Johannes is also the founding member of the Center for Neuromechanics at Stevens in 2019 and served as its Director from 2022-2024. He received the Stevens Employee Recognition Award for Student-Centricity in 2022 for his extensive efforts to promote undergraduate student research and was recently awarded the National Science Foundation Career Award in 2024.

Dr Aaron Graham is a departmental lecturer in the Solid Mechanics and Materials Engineering Group, primarily working on high-rate behaviour of soft materials, with a particular focus on full-field metrology and experimental design. His research entails developing novel test and analysis methodologies, designing experiments around the available metrological techniques and expected material behaviour.

Professor Luca Furieri joined the Department as an Associate Professor in 2025. He is also a Tutorial Fellow in Engineering at St Hugh’s College. Previously, he held a position as Principal Investigator at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he was awarded an Ambizione grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2020 from ETH Zurich. His work has been recognised with the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems Best Paper Award and the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award.

Dr Daniele de Martini has also been appointed as Associate Professor. Daniele has been working in the Mobile Robotics Group (MRG) at the Oxford Robotics Institute since 2018, first as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant and from 2023 as a Departmental Lecturer in Mobile Robotics. Daniele also joined Pembroke College in 2022 as Part-time Stipendiary College Lecturer. 

Associate Professorships awarded

Christopher Vogel, Tobias Hermann, Chao He, and Patrick Salter were all conferred Associate Professor titles in May this year.

Full Professorships awarded

The following academics were all conferred full Professorships this year:

Mark Cannon (Professor of Engineering Science)

Maurice Fallon (Professor of Robotics)

Victor Prisacariu (Professor of Artificial Intelligence)

Edmond Walsh (Professor of Engineering Science, Fluids and Heat Transfer)

Cathy Ye (Professor of Tissue Engineering)

Noa Zilberman (Professor of Engineering Science)

Professorship of Civil Engineering

Deborah Greaves, BEng Brist, DPhil Oxf, Professor of Ocean Engineering, University of Plymouth, has been appointed to the Professorship of Civil Engineering in the Department of Engineering Science with effect from 2 February 2026. Professor Greaves will be a fellow of Brasenose.

Leadership roles in MPLS Division

Two Engineering academics have been appointed to leadership roles in the University of Oxford’s Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division (MPLS). Professor of Scientific Computing Wes Armour is the new Associate Head (Digital and Information), and Professor of Informatics David Wallom has taken on the role of Associate Head (Capital, Estates, and Safety).