Ross D. King obtained a B.Sc. Hons. Microbiology from the University of Aberdeen, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Turing Institute. He is currently Professor of Machine Intelligence at the University of Manchester. His main research interests are in the interface between computer science and biology/chemistry. The research achievement he is most proud of is originating the idea of a “Robot Scientist”: using laboratory robotics to physically implement a closed-loop scientific discovery system.

His Robot Scientist “Adam” was the first machine to hypothesise and experimentally confirm scientific knowledge. His new robot “Eve” is searching for drugs against neglected tropical diseases. His work on this subject has been published in the top scientific journals, Science and Nature, and has received wide publicity. He is also very interested in building nondeterministic universal Turing machines using DNA, computational aesthetics, and computational economics. He spends his weekends walking along the Welsh coast.