Nathan Lepora is a Professor of Robotics & AI who leads the Dexterous Robotics Group in Bristol Robotics Laboratory.

I trained originally as a Mathematician at the University of Cambridge, followed by a PhD and Research Fellowship in Theoretical Physics. I then changed academic fields, with postdocs in Computational Neuroscience then Biomimetic Robotics in the Dept. of Psychology, University of Sheffield. I also have a second career as a writer of educational books with publishers such as Penguin Random House.

In 2014, I was appointed a Lecturer in Robotics in the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol, promoted to a Senior Lecturer in 2016, Reader in 2017 and Professor in 2019.

In 2017, I was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award on 'A Biomimetic Forebrain for Robot Touch', a major investment (4 postdocs) researching the interface of robotics, AI and neuroscience. This research has been covered extensively in the media, including the BBC News, all major newspapers and many others. In 2022, my project was awarded an Elektra Award for 'University Research Project of the Year' from a public vote of technology magazine readers.

I collaborate with many institutions within an ISCF Made Smarter Research Centre for 'Smart, Collaborative Industrial Robotics' (2022-25), a Horizon Europe project 'MANiBOT: Advancing roBOTs towards human-like bi-manual object MANipulation' (2024-27), and a Royal Society award on 'MultiTip: Advancing Robot Dexterity with Multimodal Tactile Sensing' (2025-27). My industrial partners include Ocado Technology, Google DeepMind, Ultraleap, Shadow Robotics, VSim, Schwarz Digital and many more.

My current focus is on the ARIA-funded project 'Democratising Co-Design of Hardware and Control for Robot Dexterity' jointly with Ed Johns (Imperial College) in the Robot Dexterity program (2025-29). There will be more to follow...