Declan Bates

Declan Bates is Professor of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering at the University of Warwick. He is Co-Director at Warwick of the EPSRC/BBSRC Oxford-Warwick-Bristol Centre for Doctoral Training in Synthetic Biology, and Co-Director of the BBSRC/EPSRC Warwick Integrative Synthetic Biology Centre (WISB).

Prof. Bates was born in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, Ireland in 1970 and educated at Powerstown National School and the High School, Clonmel. He received a B.Eng degree in Electronic Engineering and a Ph.D. degree in Robust Control Theory from the School of Electronic Engineering, Dublin City University, Ireland, in 1992 and 1996 respectively. On completing his PhD he joined the Control and Instrumentation Research Group led by Prof. Ian Postelthwaite in the Department of Engineering at Leicester University, where he worked as a post-doctoral research associate, lecturer, senior lecturer and professor. In 2010 he was appointed to a Chair in Biological Systems Engineering in the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences of the University of Exeter and in 2013 he moved to the University of Warwick as Professor of Bioengineering.

His research is focussed on the modelling, analysis, design and control of complex biological systems. In 2006, he was awarded an EPSRC Discipline Hopping Research Fellowship to pursue research on the Control Engineering/Life Sciences Interface. He is a member of one of 5 project teams formed during a week-long “sandpit” on Synthetic Biology organised by EPSRC and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2009, which were awarded over $9M in research funding – in 2013 his team were awarded further joint funding from EPSRC/NSF to continue their research collaboration. From 2007 to 2010, he was a member of BBSRC's Engineering and Biological Systems Research Committee, and subsequently a core member of BBSRC's Research Committee C on Technology and Methodological Development. From 2009 to 2014, he was a member, Co-Chair and subsequently Chair of the Research Grants Review Committee of the International Human Frontier Science Program.

He is a member of EPSRC’s Peer Review College, an associate editor of the journal IET Systems Biology, and a founding member of the EPSRC-funded Robust Synthetic Biology Network (RoSBNet). He is the co-author (with Carlo Cosentino) of Feedback Control in Systems Biology, published by Taylor & Francis. He has authored more than 125 peer reviewed research publications and obtained funding in excess of £8.5M from EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC, ESA and industry.