About

Nathan F. Lepora is a Professor of Robotics & AI who leads the Dexterous Robotics Group in Bristol Robotics Laboratory.

He originally trained as a Mathematician at the University of Cambridge then continued to a PhD and Research Fellowship in Theoretical Physics. He then started a second career as a writer, focussing on science education, recently authoring ‘Robots!’ with Penguin House publishing. He changed fields in academia as a Research Associate in Computational Neuroscience then Biomimetic Robotics at the Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield.

In 2014, he was appointed a Lecturer in Robotics in the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol, promoted to a Senior Lecturer in 2016, Reader in 2017 and Professor in 2019.

From 2014-17, he was program director for Bristol’s MSc in Robotics, which grew from an unsustainable <10 students to ~70 students in 2017. It has since grown to 100+ students, the largest in the UK and led to two further MSc programs.

In 2017, he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award on ‘A Biomimetic Forebrain for Robot Touch’, a major investment (4 postdocs) in research on the interface of computational neuroscience, AI and robotics. This research has been covered extensively in the media, including the BBC News, the World Service, all major newspapers, Bloomberg, Science and many others. In 2022, he was awarded an Elektra Award for ‘University Research Project of the Year’ from a public vote of technology magazine readers.

He is a co-investigator on the £5M ISCF Made Smarter Innovation Research Centre for ‘Smart, Collaborative Industrial Robotics’ and the £5M Horizon Europe project ‘Advancing the physical intelligence and performance of roBOTs towards human-like bi-manual objects MANipulation’. His industrial research collaborators include Ultraleap, Ocado Technology, Google DeepMind and Shadow Robotics.