DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning, Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge

Visiting Professor of Machine Learning, University of Sheffield

Member of CSaP Advisory Council

Neil Lawrence was appointed the first DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge in September 2019. He had previously been Director of Machine Learning at Amazon in Cambridge.

Prior to this Neil was Professor in Computational Biology and Machine Learning jointly appointed across the Departments of Neuroscience and Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. He currently retains this as a visiting position.

For the past five years, Professor Lawrence has also been working with Data Science Africa, an organisation looking to connect machine learning researchers in Africa in order to solve problems on the ground. In addition to his academic research, he hosts the Talking Machines podcast and is a contributor to the Guardian.

Neil started at University of Sheffield in August 2010 from the School of Computer Science in Manchester where he was a Senior Research Fellow, having previously worked in Sheffield in the Department of Computer Science and in Cambridge as a Machine Learning Researcher at Microsoft Research.

Neil's research interests are in probabilistic models with applications in computational biology, personalised health and developing economies. He led the ML@SITraN group, and helped to develop an Open Data Science Initiative an approach to data science designed to address societal needs.

Neil completed his PhD at University of Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology in 2000.