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Prof Jim Woodcock

Fellow, Visiting Fellow

Professor of Human-Cyber-Physical Systems and Distinguished Scientist, Southwest University, Chongqing, China;

PhD, MSc, BSc (Liverpool); MA (Oxford); FREng; FBCS; CITP

Professor of Human-Cyber-Physical Systems and Distinguished Scientist, Southwest University, Chongqing, China; Professor of Mobile and Autonomous Robots, Aarhus University, Denmark; Anniversary Chair Emeritus in Software Engineering, University of York; International Fellow and Distinguished Scientist, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Jim Woodcock is the Anniversary Chair Emeritus in Software Engineering at the University of York. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Chartered Engineer, a Chartered IT Professional, and an award-winning researcher and teacher. He is also the Professor of Software Engineering for Mobile and Autonomous Robots at Aarhus University and Professor of Cyber-Physical Systems at Southwest University in China. He has 45 years of experience in formal software and systems design methods. He has dedicated his research career to searching for the mathematical principles essential to the practice of software engineering. His research interests include cyber-physical systems, robotics, and digital twins, with a particular focus on industrial applications. He is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the ACM journal Formal Aspects of Computing.

He started his career in 1980 at GEC’s Hirst Research Centre in Wembley, North West London, where he worked on a novel distributed telephone exchange and on software for the System X digital exchanges. In 1984, he moved to the University of Surrey as a lecturer in Information Technology. In 1985, he joined the Programming Research Group in Oxford, led by Sir Tony Hoare FRENg, FRS, where he was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College and then the Atlas Fellow at Pembroke College. During this time, he worked on a project funded by IBM on modelling the CICS transaction processing system, under the supervision of Ib Holm Sorensen.

In 1994, he was appointed to a Lecturership in Computation with a Fellowship at Kellogg College. Around this time, he founded the Software Engineering Programme in Oxford. In 1997, he was appointed Reader in Software Engineering and in 2000, Professor. In 2001, he moved to the University of Kent and in 2004 to the University of York. He is joint leader of the High-Integrity Systems Engineering Research Group, the largest research group of its kind in the world.

He is a Chartered Engineer and a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and of the British Computer Society; he is also a member of the London Mathematical Society. He was part of the team in Oxford that won the 1992 Queen’s Award for Technological Achievement for work on software engineering with IBM. He is a visiting professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil and at Trinity College Dublin.