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St Hugh’s Honorary Fellow appointed as non-political life peer in the House of Lords

Congratulations to St Hugh’s Honorary Fellow, Professor Lionel Tarassenko CBE FREng FMedSci, who has been appointed as a non-party-political peer. He will join the crossbenches with other independent peers, who provide wide-ranging expertise to the House of Lords, enabling it to provide effective recommendations to policy being implemented by the elected members of the House of Commons.

Lionel is a world-leading expert in the application of signal processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning to healthcare, with a strong track record in translation to clinical medicine. He studied Engineering Science as an undergraduate at Keble College, Oxford, and then joined Racal to work on the early development of cellular radio. He returned to Oxford in 1981, where he completed a DPhil in medical electronics. In 1988, he was appointed as the first Tutorial Fellow in Engineering at St Hugh’s and was a member of the College for over nine years. Although St Hugh’s had admitted undergraduates to read engineering prior to Lionel’s appointment, these students were tutored by the Maths Fellows, and Lionel played a key role in developing the subject within the College. He also undertook a number of roles in College, including acting as Dean at the time when male undergraduates were first admitted. H

Lionel was the Head of the Department of Engineering Science (Dean of Engineering) from 2014 to 2019, and is now the Founding President of Reuben College. He was made a CBE for services to engineering in the 2012 New Year’s Honours List.