Ben leads the Engineering Systems Design and Innovation group (http://www.esdi.ac.uk) comprising 27 academics and over 70 fulltime researchers working across seven themes: Bionics, Bioengineering and Biomanufacturing; Design Technologies; Design Thinking; Digital Manufacturing; Energy Systems; Infrastructure Systems;  and, Systems Thinking.  

In addition to leading the ESDI division, Ben is Founder and CoDirector of the Design & Manufacturing Futures Laboratory (http://www.dmf-lab.co.uk). The lab is researching and creating the tools and technologies of tomorrow, providing game changing capability for the design, manufacture, operation and disposal of next generation products and machines. Projects include: constraint-based and topological optimisation; engineering project health monitoring; tangible interfaces and mixed media prototyping; augmented and mixed-reality; fabricative, additive and subtractive technologies; democratisation of design and manufacture; digital-physical twinning and revision control; and, manufacturing systems of the future.

Ben’s research focuses on product, machine and manufacturing system design. His major research contributions lie in four areas:

1. Design Tools and Methods – The creation of tools, technologies and methods to improve the process by which products and machines are designed with a particular emphasis on sectorial methods, understanding design practice, improving design management and leveraging emerging technology (inc. digital transformation).
2. Computational Design and Optimisation – The creation of computational tools to enable the modelling, reasoning and optimisation of products and machines with a particular emphasis on constraint-based, generative and deep learning approaches.
3. Machine and Manufacturing Systems Modelling – The creation of numerical models and modelling approaches to represent the interaction between production/manufacturing machines and the materials they handle with a particular emphasis on high-value manufacturing, and packaging, processing and pharmaceutical sectors. Recent work considers the entire value stream including suppliers, customers and policy using mixed modelling methodologies (agent-based and systems dynamics) to reason about remanufacturing strategies, resillience and sustainability. 
4. Engineering Informatics – The creation of tools and methods to support the capture and reuse of design and manufacturing information over the lifecycle, and the subsequent application of knowledge discovery techniques to generate new understanding and insights to inform design. This includes areas such as Digital Threads and mixed media product lifecycle management (physical and digital).