Chris is a member of the course teams presenting T324 Keeping Ahead in ICT, T325 Technologies for Digital Media, and T455 ICT Project – as well as a member of the team that has prepared the new project course for both ICT and Computing students, TM470.  He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and the Higher Education Academy and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers. He is regularly involved in the assessment of the quality of higher education at other institutions, both in the UK and abroad – most recently at the Arab Open University and the Berufsakademie Baden in Germany. He is also a member of the international Standing Selection Committee for the Canadian Networks of Centres of Excellence.

His major research interests are in the history of technology; mathematical modelling; and engineering education. He is a member of the Department’s Society and Information Research Group, and was an Academic Advisor for two successful prime-time BBC series The Natural History of Britain, presented by Alan Titchmarsh, and Dan Cruickshank’s What the Industrial Revolution did for us.

Chris is an avid learner (and user) of foreign languages. As part of his ongoing historical research he translated a number of seminal publications in the history of telecommunications and control engineering. They can be found here. His recent publications include a chapter on the history of automatic control in the Springer Handbook of Automation and a chapter in the collection Perspectives on Information. He has just edited, with his colleague Chris Dillon, a forthcoming collection of writing on mathematical and other modelling in engineering and technology, entitled Ways of Thinking, Ways of Seeing. A full list of publications from 2001 onwards is in the Open University's open research repository.