Welcome to our new Tutor in Engineering, Dr Harrison Steel, who will be joining us this Michaelmas Term. This is a joint appointment with the university, and Dr Steel will also be Associate Professor in Control Engineering in the Department of Engineering.
Dr Steel has a BEng in Mechanical Engineering and a BSc in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Sydney. He came to Oxford to do his DPhil in Engineering Science as a Monash scholar, and remained in Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Engineering.
Dr Steel works at the intersection of biology, control engineering, and robotics. His research is focused on the development of technologies that enable the biological revolution, combining control architectures that operate both internally (e.g. feedback control loops implemented in a cell’s DNA) and externally (e.g. automated robotic experimental platforms) to living organisms. Technologies developed in his research are used by dozens of laboratories in academia and industry and have been spun out as open-source ventures.