Neil David Lawrence is the

DeepMind DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Go ...

Professor of Machine Learning at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, senior AI

fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

at the

Alan Turing Institute The Alan Turing Institute is the United Kingdom's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, founded in 2015 and largely funded by the UK government. It is named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computing p ...

and visiting professor at the

University of Sheffield The University of Sheffield (informally Sheffield University or TUOS) is a public university, public research university in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Its history traces back to the foundation of Sheffield Medical School in 1828, Fir ...

Education

Lawrence obtained a

Bachelors in Engineering A Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) or a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) is an undergraduate academic degree awarded to a college graduate majoring in an engineering discipline at a higher education institution. In the United Kingdom, a Bac ...

degree in

mechanical engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines and mechanism (engineering), mechanisms that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and engineering mathematics, mathematics principl ...

at the

University of Southampton The University of Southampton (abbreviated as ''Soton'' in post-nominal letters) is a public university, public research university in Southampton, England. Southampton is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universit ...

, and a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

from the

, with a thesis on

variational inference Variational Bayesian methods are a family of techniques for approximating intractable integrals arising in Bayesian inference and machine learning. They are typically used in complex statistical models consisting of observed variables (usually ...

in probabilistic models, supervised by

Christopher Bishop Christopher Michael Bishop (born 7 April 1959) is a British computer scientist. He is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Director oMicrosoft Research AI4Science He is also Honorary Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and ...

Career and research

Lawrence spent a year at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

before serving as a senior lecturer in machine learning and computational biology at the

for six years. From 2007 to 2010, Lawrence was

research fellow A research fellow is an academic research position at a university or a similar research institution, usually for academic staff or faculty members. A research fellow may act either as an independent investigator or under the supervision of a p ...

at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...

Department of Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to applied disciplines (including the design and ...

, returning to the University of Sheffield in 2010 as the collaborative chair of neuro and computer science. In 2016, he was appointed director of machine learning at

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

in Cambridge, where he collaborated with , who became director of machine learning at Amazon in Berlin. Upon his appointment as the inaugural DeepMind Professor Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge in September 2019,

Ann Copestake Ann Alicia Copestake is professor of computational linguistics and head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. Education Copestake was educated at the Unive ...

stated Lawrence's addition would have a "transformative effect".

Ambassadorship

Lawrence has advocated for data transparency and privacy, writing several prominent articles in ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

'' discussing issues ranging from the privacy implications of Machine Learning algorithms deployed on citizens, the current "state of the art" in the field, the importance of data-sharing and academic transparency, to the possibilities for Machine Learning to advance developing nations such as African nations. These efforts have been called "commendable" by

Demis Hassabis Sir Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Adviser. In 2024, Ha ...

. He was solicited for his opinion on the absence of Machine Learning algorithms during the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

, to which he stated Lawrence has hosted a

podcast A podcast is a Radio program, program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. Typically, a podcast is an Episode, episodic series of digital audio Computer file, files that users can download to a personal device or str ...

with Katherine Gorman called ''Talking Machines'' between 2014 and 2021. In 2025 he was a guest on the

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. The station replaced the BBC Home Service on 30 September 1967 and broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasti ...

programme ''The Life Scientific''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lawrence, Neil Living people British computer scientists British engineers Members of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Year of birth missing (living people) Fellows of Queens' College, Cambridge