The thread running through most of this is the same: take measurements from a valuable, hard-to-inspect system, and work out what state it's in and what's about to happen to it. Only the system changes — a jet engine, a replaced hip, a buried water main. A couple of projects stray happily off that path.
Aerospace — engine health monitoring
Rolls-Royce UTC · 2014–present
Embedded wireless sensor systems for the next generation of large civil gas turbine engines, and the analysis tools and infrastructure behind a bespoke equipment health-management platform. As Systems and Architectures theme lead, my work runs from embedded SoC devices, through the system architectures that move data off the engine, to the cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity and machine learning that turn that data into actionable health assessments. This work is reflected in two 2025 US patent applications on engine health monitoring, and was recognised in July 2026 with an award under the Rolls-Royce Inventors Scheme, made by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sheffield.
Healthcare — personalised decision support
National Joint Registry & Arthritis Research UK · 2014 onwards
Applying the same data-modelling toolkit to medicine. I developed the Arthritis Research UK risk calculator, a website giving patients a personalised risk score ahead of knee or hip surgery, with the underlying modelling done by researchers at Sheffield and Bristol. I also led a National Joint Registry project — a collaboration with Northgate Public Services (now NEC Software Solutions) — to make research data available to researchers while giving the NJR tools to control their own data.
Infrastructure — condition monitoring
Buried pipes & wind turbines · 2010 onwards
At the civil-infrastructure end: an EPSRC-funded project developing ultrasonic algorithms to assess the ground condition around buried pipes from the inside, without excavation — and, right at the start of my career, the BearInspect project, developing automated novelty detection on acoustic-emission and vibration data from an operational wind turbine.
Neuromorphic computing — SpiNNaker
BIMPA project · 2013–2014
A change of scene: on the Biologically Inspired Massively Parallel Architecture project (joint with Manchester, Cambridge and Southampton), I built a ray tracer that runs on the SpiNNaker neuromorphic hardware, along with tools to distribute scenery efficiently across its many cores.
Independent practice
Hills Family Ltd · 2022–present
Through my own company I take on end-to-end software development, system architecture and server-infrastructure work for client projects.
Beyond the work
I served as local chair for the 12th UKACC International Conference on Control (Control 2018), where I also designed and developed the conference website and its publishing material.
For the papers and patents behind these projects, see Research.