Lionel Tarassenko, (born 17 April 1957) is a British engineer and academic, who is a leading expert in the application of signal processing and machine learning to healthcare. Tarassenko is President of Reuben College, Oxford.
He was previously Head of Department of Engineering Science (Dean of Engineering) at the University of Oxford, succeeded by Ronald A. Roy. Towards the end of his time as Dean, the Department rose to number 1 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
Tarassenko was elected Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Oxford in 1997 and was a Professorial Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, from 1997 to 2019. In 2019 he was invited by the Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson to oversee the development of Reuben College, the University's 39th college. He is also a Pro-Vice Chancellor and the Chair of the Management Committee of the Maison Française d’Oxford.
Tarassenko is the author of over 280 journal papers, 200 conference papers, 3 books and over 30 granted patents. He has supervised 65 doctoral students. He has been a founder director of four University spin-out companies, the latest being Oxehealth in September 2012. He was the R&D Director and Chair of the Strategic Advisory Board of Sensyne Health, an AIM-listed company from 2018 to 2022. He is a director of the University’s wholly owned Technology Transfer company, Oxford University Innovation. He was the editor-in-chief of the 2018 Topol Review of NHS Technology and its impact on the workforce.
Tarassenko was the driving force behind the creation of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME) at the University of Oxford, which he directed from its opening in April, 2008 to October, 2012. He established an £8m Centre of Excellence in Medical Engineering within the IBME, and led the Technology & Digital Health theme in the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre from its inception in 2007 until 2022. Under his leadership, the IBME grew from 110 to 220 academic researchers and it was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in 2015 for “new collaborations between engineering and medicine delivering benefit to patients”.
Education
Tarassenko completed his BA in Engineering Science in 1978 at Keble College, University of Oxford. Later he obtained his DPhil in 1985, also at the University of Oxford for his work on the early identification of brain haemorrhages in pre-term infants.
Career and Research
Together with Professor Alan Murray of University of Edinburgh, Tarassenko is the inventor of the pulse-stream technique for analogue implementation of massively parallel neural networks. He gradually moved away from designing neural network hardware to developing new machine learning algorithms and applying them to problems as diverse as the automated re-heating of food and drinks in a microwave oven (implemented in the Sharp LogiCook oven) and the analysis of sleep disorders. This body of work was recognised in 1996 by the award of the IEE Mather Premium for innovation using neural networks.
Tarassenko then went on to develop methods for learning how to characterise normality in safety-critical systems. With his research team, he designed the QUICK system, which was at the core of Rolls-Royce’s engine health monitoring strategy in the 1990s and the early 2000s. As a result, he and his Rolls-Royce collaborators were awarded the Chairman’s Team Award for Technical Innovation in 2001 and the Sir Henry Royce High Value Patent Award in 2008.
When he became the first Director of the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering in 2008, Tarassenko focused his research on patient monitoring, both in and out of hospital. His work has had a major impact on the identification of deterioration in acute care and on the management of long-term conditions. He has been a pioneer in developing early warning systems for acutely ill patients. The machine-learning system (Visensia) which he designed for patient monitoring in critical care was the first such system to gain FDA approval (in 2008).
In the last decade Tarassenko has led the engineering development of several digital health products including: (a) GDm-Health, a digital therapeutic for the management of gestational diabetes; (b) SEND, a system for monitoring in-hospital patient vital signs and identifying deterioration early;(c) EDGE-COPD, a digital therapeutic for the self-monitoring and self-management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; and (d) Support-HF, a system for heart failure management in the community.