Welcome

I am a (Full) Professor of Computer Science at the School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, and the Director of the Systems Infrastructure Research (SIR) lab in the Huawei Edinburgh Research Center. I have spent large portions of my career in industry and have worked as a Research Scientist at Google on two separate occasions where I contributed to Borg and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Previously I held a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. I have industry experience in research and development at Google, Hewlett Packard, Cloudsoft, and BAE Systems. Prior to obtaining a faculty position, I worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Edinburgh. I hold a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh; the focus of my PhD was Web service choreography.

To support my research I am an Investigator (both PI and Co-I) on grants worth over £3 Million from a diverse range of funding sources, including the EPSRC, European Research Council (ERC), Royal Society, Google, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), SICSA, Amazon and Microsoft. I am an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC) and Cluster Computing. I am an alumnus of the Scottish Crucible, a research leadership programme. I serve as a regular Independent Expert and project evaluator on big data for the European Commission. Please see my LinkedIn profile for further details.

I am always looking for engineering-focused PhD students interested in pursuing research on topics related to distributed systems, cloud computing and data-intensive computing. I have a successful track record of PhD supervision and have currently supervised eight doctoral students to completion. My recent PhD students have ended up in top-tier companies including Google, Amazon, Nvidia and Adobe. Please read my PhD FAQ before contacting me.