I am a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Robotics and Chemistry Automation at the University of Liverpool. With my group, I am very excited to develop methods towards creating the next generation of robotic scientists for accelerating material discovery.
Research Interests
My research interests lie within the intersection of robotics and applied machine learning, with a particular focus on intelligent robotic manipulation for laboratory environments. I am broadly interested in the following topics:
- contact-based robot skill learning
- failure recovery methods in laboratory environments
- safe human-robot collaboration
- machine vision for laboratory environments
- physics-constrained learning
Moreover, I am passionate about deploying algorithms to control the dynamic behaviour of robots with the goal of moving closer to robots that can adapt in real-world environments.
Openings
I will be hiring 2 PDRAs on new EPSRC-funded projects starting later this year. Further details on these positions will follow - please email me your CV and short motivation letter if you are interested in joining my group (start date June - September 2026).
Most Recent News
(06/2026) New papers at IEEE/RSJ IROS (Learning Adaptive Force Control for Contact-Rich Sample Scraping with Heterogeneous Materials - congrats Cenk on his first PhD paper acceptance!) and at IEEE CASE (SAFE-CHEM - congrats Laura on her first PhD paper acceptance!)
(04/2026) We have been awarded the AIchemy Frontier Fund - HATCh - an exciting new project with University of York and University of Sheffield!
(04/2026) We have been awarded an EPSRC Centre-to-Centre grant - an exciting new project with Imperial College London (AIchemy) and Acceleration Consortium!
(04/2026) Our paper has been accepted in RSC Digital Discovery under the Emerging New Investigators category. Congratulations to Nikola and Thomas for this work!
(03/2026) Matthew has joined my research group as a PhD student on the EPSRC New Investigator Award project. He will be working on evaluating tool-material interaction for robotic chemists!
(02/2026) Xin has joined my research group as a PDRA on the EPSRC New Investigator Award project. She will be working on co-design of tools for robotic chemists!
(01/26) Our paper has been accepted at IEEE ICRA 2026! Congratulations to Nikola on his first PhD paper acceptance!
(01/2026) The 3rd edition of our workshop ADNSL has been accepted for ICRA 2026. CFP is open!
(01/2026) I gave the keynote talk at the New Starters in AI for Chemistry.
(01/2026) I gave an invited talk at the UK Robot Manipulation Workshop 2026.
(01/2026) Together with Andy Cooper, we have been awarded the AI Scientist ARIA grant.
(01/2026) Ayesha has joined my research group as an industry-funded CDT DAMC student, working on a project with Bristol Myers Squibb!
(12/25) Our paper, in collaboration with the Acceleration Consortium, has been accepted in Nature Comp. Sci. Congratulations to all the team!
(08/2025) I have been awarded the EPSRC New Investigator Award with my project Accelerating Laboratory Automation Through Learning Tool Morphology For Robotic Chemists! We will be hiring a PDRA and PhD student to join our group.
(08/2025) Laura and Cenk gave fantastic presentations at TAROS 2025 - Session 9b: Autonomous Robotic Systems for Laboratory Experiments! Congrats to Cenk on winning Best Project/Presentation during the session!