Engineering Science

Wouter Mostert earned his PhD at the University of Queensland in 2015, on the topic of hydrodynamic stability of magnetohydrodynamic implosions, with application to inertial fusion energy, and in the propagation of shock waves. As a postdoc, he continued in this work at Caltech, before moving to study breaking ocean waves at Princeton University. He continued with this research as an Assistant Professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, before joining Oxford in the Environmental Fluid Mechanics group.

Wouter Mostert has interests in fluid mechanics, namely in air-sea interaction and flux of mass, momentum and energy primarily due to wave breaking, along with the associated dynamics of bubbles and droplets, which play a large role in these kinds of problems. He is further interested in the effects of ocean wave systems on sediment and pollutant transport, along with better understanding wave loadings on civil infrastructure.

His current interests are in understanding energy, bubble and droplet statistics in plunging breakers; in wind-driven spume generation processes in ocean waves; in the dissipative properties of shallow-water breakers and coastal wave systems; and the combined effects of wind, waves and storm surge on coastal infrastructure.

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Huiqi Yvonne Lu is a biomedical data scientist, an Associate Member of Faculty and the Co-Chair of Researchers Committee at the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford. She also holds an honorary Research Fellow position at the George Institute for Global Health, Imperial College London. Her research focuses on clinical machine learning, sensor signal processing, and wearable devices for patient monitoring, especially on digital health innovations for global women’s health and chronic health conditions such as diabetes. Her current research interest is to develop health foundation model for time-series data, and exploring the feasibility of using meta-learning with large language models for explainable AI for health monitoring, disease discovery, thereby reduce digital health disparities, especially for LMICs. One of her recent research adventures is to develop reasoning-informed model to enhance clinical capacity in India using large language models, funded by the Bills and Melinda Gates Foundation Global Challenge Grant and the George Institute for Global Health.

Dr Lu obtained her DPhil in mobile computing and pattern recognition at the Centre of Signal Processing and Industrial Informatics, University of Sussex, UK, sponsored by the UKRI Oversea Research Student Scholarship and the Sussex GTA Scholarship. During her doctoral study, she developed a commercial iris-identification system for mobile devices, which led to a patent and her work was presented at the SET for Britain, UK Parliament. After finishing her DPhil, Dr Lu moved onto the biomedical & clinical research on electrical impedance tomography for breast cancer at the Oxford John Radcliff Hospital (funded by GE Health) and diabetic retinopathy imaging at the Institute of Chronic Diseases, University of Liverpool.

In 2019, after a five-year career break, Dr Lu joined the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford with a Daphne Jackson Trust Career Re-entry Research Fellowship, sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the University of Oxford. Her Fellowship project focused on the development of machine learning methods for robustly tracking patient condition using home-monitoring systems for chronic disease, with a special focus on maternal health and diabetes. During her journey at the Computational Health Informatics (CHI) Lab, with great honour, Dr Lu was mentored by Prof David Clifton (AI in health — Engineering Science) and Prof Lucy MacKillop (clinical — Oxford University Hospitals and and industrial — EMIS Health). She was honoured to attain the Somerville College Fulford Junior Research Fellowship (2020-2023), the Oxford MPLS Enterprise and Innovation Research Fellowship (2021-2022), and the Oxford Saïd Business School Idea2Impact Research Fellowship (2023). In recognition of her academic progression, she was promoted to the Associate Member of Faculty in 2023. Dr Lu has led and co-led clinical AI and mobile biometrics projects in both academic and commercial settings, and filed one patent.

Dr Lu is an Associate Editor of Nature npj Women’s Health, a Chief Editor of the special collection of Advances in AI for women’s health, reproductive health, and maternal care: bridging innovation and healthcare, and a guest editor of Frontier Signal Processing. She has served as a workshop committee member and junior round table chair at at notable conferences, including ICLR (PMLDC), NeurIPs (ML4H), IJCAI(KDHD), and the PHME. Dr Lu is an active contributor in the IEEE Standard Committee for P3191: Performance Monitoring of Machine Learning-enabled Medical Device in Clinical Use.

Dr Lu is also a Royal Academy of Engineering STEM Ambassador (2020 — current).

• Machine learning and health foundation models
• Digital health innovations for patient monitoring
• Signal processing on time-series sensor data
• Physiological and psychological modelling with inference learning and LLMs
• Robotics and human interactions

I received the Diploma in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, in 2008 and the Ph.D. in automatic control from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in November 2012, under the supervision of Prof. John Lygeros.

From December 2012 till December 2013 I was a post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich working with Prof. John Lygeros, while from January 2014 till January 2015 I was a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at UC Berkeley, working with Prof. Shmuel Oren. From February 2015 till February 2016 I was a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, at Politecnico di Milano, working with Prof. Maria Prandini.

In March 2016, I joined the Control Group, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, where I am currently an Associate Professor. I am also a Fellow in AI & Machine Learning at Reuben College, and a Lecturer at Worcester College.

Since 2020 I am an Associate Editor for Automatica. Since 2016 I am an Associate Editor, Conference Editorial Board: IEEE CSS, EUCA and IFAC. In 2019, 2020 and 2021 I received a Teaching Excellence Award, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford (upon nomination of undergraduate students). In 2013 I received the ETH Medal for my PhD thesis.

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I graduated from the University of Oxford in 2021, obtaining an MEng in Engineering Science with a focus on information and control. In my final year project I investigated distributed charging of electric vehicles with considerations for uncertainty in supply. I am currently working towards a DPhil in Engineering Science as part of the Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems CDT at the University of Oxford under the joint supervision of Prof. Kostas Margellos and Prof. Alessandro Abate.

DPhil project: Data-driven Robust Verification and Control

Ensuring safe operation of dynamical systems is an important challenge for the modern world. A key part of this challenge involves designing methods for the control of systems, so that they meet safety specifications without being overly conservative.
We consider tackling this challenge through data-driven techniques. These techniques allow us to design controllers which are robust to uncertainty based only on samples of that uncertainty, without assuming to know anything further about this uncertainty.

I read for an MEng in Engineering, Economics and Management at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 2006 with a first-class degree having been awarded the Edgell Sheppee prize, Lubbock prize and Lubbock scholarship. I subsequently remained at Balliol for my DPhil, where I performed research into turbine blade tip cooling in civil aerospace jet engines for Rolls-Royce. Following my doctoral studies, I joined Lotus F1 Team in 2012 as a computational aerodynamicist. During this period, I gained chartership with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Having spent a season and a half in F1, I returned to the Oxford Thermofluids Institute as a post-doctoral researcher at the end of 2013. I am now a Senior Research Associate in the Active Flow Control group, conducting research into technologies supporting future liquid hydrogen-fuelled aircraft for zero-carbon aviation.

I have a strong interest in teaching, and am a Fellow of the HEA and also hold the SEDA-PDF Learning Teaching and Assessing award, which is aligned with descriptor 2 of the UK Professional Standards Framework. I act as a mentor to several early-stage tutors to help them develop their methods and find their own style as they embark on their teaching journey. On the undergraduate Engineering Science course, I teach:

• Papers P1 & A1: Mathematics
• Papers P3 & A3: Structures, Materials and Mechanics
• Papers P4 & A4: Fluid mechanics, Thermodynamics and Heat & Mass Transfer
• Paper B2: Engineering in Society.

I am also a lecturer at Balliol College and Jesus College.

My current research focuses on the development of novel fluidic devices for the control of combustion in hydrogen-fueled, zero emissions clean aviation engines. Additionally, I am also conducting research and development in plasma-actuated, no-moving-parts valves for integration into the secondary air systems of large civil aviation jet engines and ultrasonically activated fluidic switches used for external aerodynamic flow control.