Rate My Professor Harrison Steel

Harrison Steel is an Associate Professor of Engineering Science in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford and Official Fellow and Tutor in Engineering at Harris Manchester College. He holds a BSc in Physics and Mathematics and a BEng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Sydney. Steel came to Oxford as a Monash Scholar to complete his DPhil in Engineering Science. Following his doctoral studies, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department's Control Group before being appointed Associate Professor in 2020.

His research addresses interdisciplinary challenges at the intersection of synthetic biology, control engineering, and robotics. Steel develops synthetic biological feedback systems to enable robust, safe biotechnologies resilient to environmental variations, with applications in fields such as agriculture and medicine. He has created experimental robotic platforms, including the Chi.Bio open-source bioreactor, now used by dozens of academic and industry laboratories worldwide. His group also pursues theoretical investigations into control and biology using mathematical modeling. Key publications include "Quantum spin resonance in engineered proteins for multimodal sensing" (Abrahams et al., Nature, 2026), "A coarse-grained bacterial cell model for resource-aware analysis and design of synthetic gene circuits" (Sechkar et al., Nature Communications, 2024), "Chi.Bio: An open-source automated experimental platform for biological science research" (Steel et al., PLOS Biology, 2020), and "Synthetic negative feedback circuits using engineered small RNAs" (Kelly et al., Nucleic Acids Research, 2018). Steel has received the 2022 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Engineering, the 2023 Royal Academy of Engineering Sir George Macfarlane Medal and Young Engineer of the Year, the 2023 MPLS Early Career Commercial Impact Prize, and the 2024 MPLS Award for Outstanding Research Supervision.