Nathan F. Lepora is a Professor of Robotics & AI who leads the Dexterous Robotics Group in Bristol Robotics Laboratory.
In 2014, I was appointed a Lecturer in Robotics in the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol, became a Senior Lecturer in 2016, Reader in 2017 and was promoted to a full Professor of Robotics & AI in 2019.
My current focus is on the ARIA-funded project ‘Democratising Co-Design of Hardware and Control for Robot Dexterity’ jointly with Ed Johns (Imperial College) in the Robot Dexterity program (2025-29).
Background: I trained originally as a Mathematician at the University of Cambridge, followed by a PhD and Research Fellowship. My supervisor Prof. Anne Davis is a leading Particle Cosmologist who was the first woman to be appointed a professor in the Faculty of Mathematics in Cambridge. My postdoctoral advisor Prof. Tom Kibble was one of the leading particle physicists of his generation who jointly discovered the Higgs (formerly known as Higgs-Kibble) mechanism.
In 2017, I 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, my project was awarded an Elektra Award for ‘University Research Project of the Year‘ from a public vote of technology magazine readers.
I collaborate with many institutions within an ISCF Made Smarter Research Centre for ‘Smart, Collaborative Industrial Robotics‘ (2022-25), a Horizon Europe project ‘MANiBOT: Advancing roBOTs towards human-like bi-manual object MANipulation‘ (2024-27), and a Royal Society award on ‘MultiTip: Advancing Robot Dexterity with Multimodal Tactile Sensing’ (2025-27). My industrial partners include Ocado Technology, Google DeepMind, Ultraleap, Shadow Robotics, VSim, Schwarz Digital and many more.
Links
→ Short CV
→ Google Scholar
→ Staff page – University of Bristol
Resarch Group
→ Dexterous Robotics – Bristol Robotics Laboratory
→ Formerly, Tactile Robotics – Bristol Robotics Laboratory
Former PhD Students & Postdocs
My PhD students often do internships with well-known companies during their PhDs, including several with Google DeepMind and Meta. Some also intern with Robotics/AI start-ups with which I have research connections, such as VSim.
Uriel Martinez-Hernandez – Senior Lecturer in Robotics, University of Bath
Javier Cabellero – Chief Statistician, General Medical Council
Ben Ward-Cherrier – Senior Lecturer in Robotics, University of Bristol
Elena Gianniccini – Lecturer in Robotics, University of Aberdeen
Emma Roscow – Machine Learning Engineer, Scaled Robotics
Luke Cramphorn – Lead Robotics Research Engineer, Dyson
Anupam Gupta – Lead Robotics Research Engineer, Dyson
Nick Pestell – Senior Model Developer, Animal and Plant Health Agency
Kirsty Aquilina – Senior Data Scientist, Autonomous Driving (Aptiv)
Jasper James – Senior Robotics Engineer, Rovco
Efi Psomopoulou – Lecturer in Robotics, University of Bristol
Noor Alakhawand – Research Engineer, Ultraleap
Alex Church – AI Team Lead, Cambrian Robotics
Sophie Baker – Teaching Associate, University of Bristol
Chris Ford – Research Associate, University of Bristol
Saekwang Nam – Assistant Professor, Kyungpook National University
Kipp McAdam Freud – Research Scientist, Meta
Haoran Li – Assistant Professor, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Yijiong Lin – Research Associate, University of Bristol
Nathan Lepora 