Submitted by Rachel Gardner on Wed, 11/06/2025 - 12:07
Congratulations to the three members of this Department who have been promoted as Professor.
Every year, the University runs a rigorous and competitive Senior Academic Promotion process. We are delighted that at the end of the 2024-25 process, three of our colleagues have been promoted. They are Emily Shuckburgh, Andreas Vlachos and Ian Wassell.
There is a professorial promotion for Prof Emily Shuckburgh.
Emily is Professor of Environmental Data Science here and Director of Cambridge Zero, Cambridge University's major climate change initiative. Her primary research is focused on the application of AI to climate science.
She is Academic Director of the Institute of Computing for Climate Science which supports the work of climate scientists through computer science, software engineering, and data science research.
Emily is co-Director of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training on the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER).
She is also a member of this Department's Energy and Environment Group which applies computer science to address renewable energy integration, energy demand reduction, and the assessment and management of environmental impact (e.g. climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation) from anthropogenic activities.
There is also professorial promotion for Prof Andreas Vlachos.
Andreas is Professor of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning here, and is a Dinesh Dhamija fellow of Fitzwilliam College.
His current research projects include dialogue modelling, automated fact-checking and imitation learning. He has also worked on semantic parsing, natural language generation and summarization, language modelling, information extraction, active learning, clustering and biomedical text mining.
Andreas was previously a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, working on the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. He completed his PhD here at Cambridge supervised by Ted Briscoe and Zoubin Ghahramani before going on to postdoctoral research in the Machine Reading group at UCL, the NLIP group here at Cambridge, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working with Mark Craven.
Work by Andreas and colleagues was this year awarded 'Publication of the Year' in our Hall of Fame Awards. Their paper Causal Estimation of Memorisation Profiles by Pietro Lesci, Clara Meister, Thomas Hofmann, Andreas Vlachos & Tiago Pimentel also won a best long paper award at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) – the premier venue in the field.
Dr Ian Wassell has been promoted from Associate Professor to Professor.
A long-standing member of the University of Cambridge, Ian joined the Department of Engineering in 1999 and then came to this Department as a Senior Lecturer in 2006. He lectures on Digital Electronics and teaches Hardware Practical Classes that enable first-year undergraduates to get hands-on experience of designing, building, testing and debugging digital electronic circuits
Ian completed his PhD degree at the University of Southampton in 1990, where he investigated Viterbi Equalisation for wireless and mobile systems. He has over 25 years' experience in the simulation and design of radio communication systems gained via a number of positions in industry and higher education. He has published more than 200 publications and successfully supervised PhD and MPhil students. He now leads the research on wireless communications in the Digital Technology Group here.
Ian is also a fellow of Churchill College and has supervised second year linear systems and communication topics to Churchill engineering students for a number of years. He is a Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).
