Rate My Professor Hector Zenil

Dr Hector Zenil is Senior Lecturer / Associate Professor at the School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences in the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine at King’s College London, where he is also affiliated with the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He co-leads the Algorithmic Dynamics Lab, a joint lab between the Karolinska Institute and KCL. His research lies at the intersection of information theory, complexity science, causal AI and biomedical engineering to understand living systems and their transition from health to disease. He introduced the field of Algorithmic Information Dynamics, a symbolic regression and program synthesis framework based on optimal inference theory that combines classical and algorithmic information theories with causal inference and perturbation analysis to tackle inverse problems.

Dr Zenil holds two PhDs, one in Computer Science from Lille I and one in Logic and Epistemology from Paris 1 Sorbonne/École Normale Supérieure. Before joining KCL, he was at the Machine Learning Group in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, and previously at the Structural Biology Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford as a faculty member, senior researcher and John Templeton Principal Investigator. He was an Assistant Professor and lab leader at the Algorithmic Dynamics Lab at the Karolinska Institute, where he received the VR Young Researcher Award. He has been an invited scholar and professor at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, the National University of Singapore and KAUST. Dr Zenil is Editor-in-Chief of the Complex Systems journal, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, an elected member of the London Mathematical Society, a Trustee of the British Society for Research on Ageing, Academic Entrepreneur in Residence at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering, and Research Associate Member of the Cancer Research Group at the Francis Crick Institute. He is the founder and CEO of Oxford Immune Algorithmics Ltd trading as Algocyte, a MedTech AI spin-out.