New Departmental Lecturers and Associate Professors

Professor Amro Awad joined the Department in May 2024 as Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering, with a focus on Digital Technologies. He is also a Tutorial Fellow at University College. Before moving to Oxford, he led the Secure and Advanced Computer Architecture research group at NC State as a tenured Associate Professor. Amro had several industrial stints at HP Labs, AMD Research, and MediaTek USA. He also worked at US government labs, including Los Alamos National Lab, Sandia National Laboratories, and Air Force Research Labs. Amro has more than 8 granted US patents, has been inducted to the prestigious IEEE TCCA HPCA Hall of Fame, and has been an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO) since February 2024. He is a recipient of the Bennett Faculty Fellowship (2023) and Goodnight Early Career (2023) awards.

Dr Cheng Ouyang joined as a Departmental Lecturer in AI for Healthcare Imaging in April 2024, working in the Biomedical Image Analysis Lab. His research centres on data-efficient, trustworthy, and user-friendly machine learning approaches for medical image computing. His research topics include but are not limited to out-of-distribution generalisation, few-/zero-shot learning, uncertainty modelling, and multimodal learning, primarily in the context of enhancing human-machine collaborations in both real-world clinical workflows and health research. Prior to joining Oxford, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Clinical Sciences, Imperial College London, focusing on machine learning techniques for cardiovascular research. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Computing, Imperial College London in 2023.

Dr Federico Zilic de Arcos joined as a Departmental Lecturer in Civil Engineering Fluid Mechanics in May 2024. He completed his undergraduate studies in naval engineering in 2015 at the Austral University of Chile, specialising in naval architecture and marine engineering. After working as a research assistant at the Canal de Ensayos Hidrodinámicos in Valdivia, Chile, and co-founding the start-up company Okeanos, he joined the Oxford Tidal Energy group in 2017 as a DPhil student. His thesis focused on tidal turbine hydrodynamics and fluid-structure interactions. Following a short postdoc in Oxford, Federico was awarded an H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship co-funded by the Region of Normandy. The objective of his fellowship was to study dynamic loads on axial-flow turbines and floating energy systems at the Laboratoire Ondes et Milieux Complexes in Le Havre, France. He returned to the University of Oxford in 2024 as a Departmental Lecturer in Civil Engineering Fluid Mechanics in association with St Edmund Hall.

Additionally Sarah Sparrow and Paul Beard have been conferred the title of Associate Professor.

Professor Sparrow is Deputy Course Director for the MSc in Energy Systems, and is climateprediction.net (CPDN) Programme Coordinator at the Oxford e-Research Centre. As well as being a core part of the Energy System MSc leadership team, she leads research projects on extreme weather events and their impacts on health, water, energy and finance. She regularly organizes highly successful workshops and hackathon events on extreme event attribution. Following her doctorate in atmospheric physics from the University of Oxford, she worked in the IT industry on business management systems and as a post-doctoral research scientist looking at drivers of atmospheric variability.

Professor Beard leads the Oxford Turbine Research Facility (OTRF) research group at the Oxford Thermofluids Institute. This major test facility was designed and built by the Department of Engineering Science, originally for the Ministry of Defence, before its move to Oxford in 2010. Paul gained a MEng and DPhil both from Exeter College where he now holds a college lectureship. His research, funded primarily by Rolls-Royce, focusses on aerothermal turbine performance in highly engine representative conditions and development of advanced blade cooling concepts to aid the route to Net-Zero for aviation by 2050.