Neil Lawrence, senior principal scientist, Amazon
Neil received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southampton in 1994. Following a period as a field engineer on oil rigs in the North Sea he returned to academia to complete his PhD in 2000 at the Computer Lab in Cambridge University. He spent a year at Microsoft Research in Cambridge before leaving to take up a lectureship at the University of Sheffield, where he was subsequently appointed senior lecturer in 2005. In January 2007 he took up a post as a senior research fellow at the School of Computer Science in the University of Manchester where he worked in the Machine Learning and Optimisation research group. In August 2010 he returned to Sheffield to take up a collaborative Chair in Neuroscience and Computer Science. From September 2016 he’s taken a leave of absence to form a new machine learning group for Amazon in Cambridge.