Nick Jennings

Education and early life Jennings was born in London. He grew up on the Isle of Portland in Dorset and attended Weymouth Grammar School. He studied for an undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Exeter and his PhD was from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Queen Mary, University of London.

Research and career His research focus is on developing AI systems for large-scale, open and dynamic environments. In particular, on endowing individual autonomous agents with the ability to act and interact in flexible ways, and with building systems that contain both humans and software agents that work together in partnership.

His systems have been used to save lives in the aftermath of disasters, to win Olympic medals for Team GB, and to monitor the impact of climate change on glaciers. ) and graduated over 50 PhD students (including two winners and one runner-up of the British Computer Society (BCS)/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Award. ) He has over 100,000 citations in Google Scholar and an h-index of 139.

From 1988 he was at Queen Mary, University of London, where he was a PhD student, lecturer, reader and professor.

In 1999, he moved to the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton where he was the Deputy Head of Department, the Associate Dean (Research and Enterprise) for the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Maths, the Head of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group and the Head of Department. He was appointed the UK's first Regius Professor of Computer Science in 2014 .

From 2010 to 2015, he was the UK Government's first Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security.

In 2016, he moved to Imperial College to be the Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise), as well as a Professor of Artificial Intelligence.

In 2021, he was appointed as the 9th Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University.

Awards Jennings was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in the 2016 New Year Honours for services to computer science and national security science.

2007: Int. Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Special Recognition Award for “Intelligent agents: theory and practice” in The Knowledge Engineering Review 2016: IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize (Honourable Mention) for “Theoretical and practical foundations of large-scale agent-based micro-storage in the smart grid” in Journal of AI Research 2016: The Engineer’s “Collaborate to Innovate” Award for the ORCHID project 2018: Int. Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Influential Paper Award for “Developing multiagent systems: the Gaia methodology” in ACM Trans. on Software Engineering and Methodology 2020: BCS Lovelace Medal 2026: IJCAI-26 Award for Research Excellence

Fellowships

2019: Fellow City and Guilds of London Institute 2020: Honorary Fellow of the Cybernetics Society 2022: Fellow of the Royal Society

Personal life Jennings is married to Jo and they have two children.