Pint of Robotics: Alex Brown, Nikita Murasovs, Professor Paolo Actis

Speaker 1: Alex Brown (STORM Lab, University of Leeds)

Bio: Alex is a 1st year PhD student in the STORM lab within the University of Leeds, after graduating in the summer of 2024 with an MEng in Mechatronics and Robotics. His current research centres around medical device development for the small bowel, and the growing field of vine robotics. Outside of his research, Alex has been competing in the sport of combat robotics for 19 years, and has won many prestigious titles, including the World and UK championship. After a 3 and a half year hiatus during the covid pandemic and his early years at university, this talk will concentrate mainly on what goes into a combat robot, and what his team are doing to get back to being world number 1!

Speaker 2: Nikita Murasovs (STORM Lab, University of Leeds)

Bio: Nikita holds a Joint Degree in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from the University of Aberdeen, where he discovered his passion for control systems and robotics. Currently, he is part of the STORM Lab, focusing on medical robotics research, specifically developing innovative MRI-compatible robotic catheters with advanced sensing and actuation capabilities.

Mentor: Professor Paolo Actis (School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Bio: Paolo graduated with a Master in Materials Science from the University of Torino (IT) and Université Joseph Fourier (FR) in 2005. He completed his PhD in Electrochemistry in 2008 from the Grenoble Institute of Technology (FR), and spent 4 years in California working on his tan at NASA Ames (US) and UC Santa Cruz (US) before crossing the pond again to lose his tan at Imperial College London (UK). He then spent two years at Bio Nano Consulting as a Consultant & Project Manager before joining the University of Leeds in 2006 first as Lecturer and then as Associate professor since 2021.