James Taylor

Professor James Taylor is a distinguished academic at Lancaster University where he holds a Personal Chair in Control Engineering within the School of Engineering. As Impact Champion for the School of Engineering and lead for Robotics & Control, he has been instrumental in advancing control engineering research. Previously, he served as group lead for Nuclear Science & Engineering (2019-24) and held senior administrative roles including Director of Teaching and Deputy Head of Engineering (2005-2018).

Professor Taylor's research spans data-driven modelling and automatic control for challenging, uncertain systems with applications in

• Energy systems
• Healthcare
• Robotics
• Environmental monitoring

His work has attracted over £10m in UK research council funding as co-investigator across 10+ projects.

He has made significant contributions through his research on topics such as

• Electricity theft detection using machine learning
• Nuclear fuel analysis with hyperspectral imaging
• Digital twins for nuclear manufacturing
• Adaptive medical treatment systems
• Robotic plant phenotyping platforms

Scientific recognition includes:

• Fellow of the Institution of Engineering & Technology (FIET)
• Member of IET Academic Accreditation Committee
• Editorial board member for three Elsevier journals
• Active participation in UK Automatic Control Council

Professor Taylor has supervised numerous PhD students to successful completion and co-develops the internationally used CAPTAIN Toolbox (MATLAB) for system identification and control. He has been involved in developing control systems for

• Hydraulically actuated dual-arm robots
• Wave energy converters
• Assisted tele-operation systems
• Grow-cell agricultural facilities
• Motion planning algorithms