Three academics awarded title of Professor in 2025 Recognition of Distinction Exercise

Three academics from the department have been awarded the title of Professor through the University of Oxford’s 2025 Recognition of Distinction Exercise: Alfonso Bueno-Orovio, Yarin Gal, and Aleks Kissinger.

The Recognition of Distinction Exercise confers the title of full Professor on academics who have demonstrated an internationally recognised record of research excellence and have made a significant contribution to teaching and academic citizenship.

Professor Alfonso Bueno-Orovio is Professor of Computational Modelling in the department, a Principal Investigator of the Computational Cardiovascular Science team, Principal Investigator at the Oxford Centre of Research Excellence of the British Heart Foundation (BHF), and former BHF Basic Science Research Fellow. He is dedicated to advancing the field of Computational Medicine to investigate mechanisms of disease, improve patient risk stratification, and support personalised therapies. His research centres on the interplay between cardiac function and structure in driving life-threatening arrhythmias, integrating clinical and experimental data with computer modelling and simulation. His work supports the development of safer therapies and the reduction and replacement of animals in research. He also leads research on advanced mathematical modelling of cardiac tissue and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. By integrating data across multiple biological scales, his work aims to translate fundamental insights into clinical and industrial applications through close collaboration with clinicians and external partners.

Professor Yarin Gal is Associate Professor of Machine Learning in the department, Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science at Christ Church, Oxford, and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He leads the Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning (OATML) group, where his research focuses on Bayesian deep learning, robustness, and uncertainty quantification. His work has contributed to the development of machine learning tools that can communicate when they are uncertain or operating outside of their training distribution – approaches that have been widely adopted in fields such as healthcare, robotics, and astronomy. He collaborates closely with industry and government on the responsible deployment of machine learning, and his research continues to explore the interplay between fundamental theory and real-world applications. In recent work with EleutherAI and the AI Security Institute, Gal co-led a study showing how filtering harmful knowledge during training can embed safety into open-weight models from the outset – a step forward in preventing their misuse in high-risk domains such as biothreat research.

Professor Aleks Kissinger is a Professor of Quantum Computing and joint head of the Quantum Group in the department. His research focuses on quantum software, namely quantum compilation, fault-tolerant quantum computing, and classical simulation and verification of quantum computations. Much of his work draws on diagrammatic and graph-theoretic approaches to reasoning about quantum systems. He is the co-author of two textbooks, Picturing Quantum Processes and Picturing Quantum Software, which are foundational texts on the application of diagrammatic techniques to quantum theory and quantum computation, respectively.

The conferral of the title of Professor recognises the significant impact of their research and their leadership across the wider academic community.