Meet EEE's new academic staff

We're delighted to welcome two new academic staff members to the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering this autumn: Dr Sam Coward and Dr Nick Moser

Dr Sam Coward, Assistant Professor in Circuits and Systems

Sam studied maths as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. After several internships in the semiconductor industry and two years as a firmware engineer at Nokia, he came to EEE for a PhD in digital circuit design, supervised by Professor George Constantinides. Alongside his studies, he spent four years at Intel's Graphics Numerical Hardware Group, contributing to its GPU designs. In 2024 his research won the department's Stylianos Kalaitzis Award for the most promising doctoral work, and he graduated in 2025. He then moved to UCL as an 1851 Research Fellow, before returning to the department this autumn.

Sam explains the focus of his research in everyday terms: "My research is all about building the core computational units of computer chips, making them run faster and more efficiently," he says. "This corresponds to improvements in the capabilities and battery life of devices that depend on these chips."

In his new role, Sam hopes to open up new areas of research. "I've been getting really excited by how we can massively expand the use of formal methods, namely how we can prove circuit designs correct," he says. "AI is lowering the barrier to these technologies and will play an ever bigger role across industry, I expect."

On the teaching side, this autumn term Sam will be helping MEng students develop computer chips that will be sent off to be manufactured, and teaching the MSc cohort how to build circuits in SystemVerilog.

He's also keen to hear from potential research students interested in chip design.

Dr Nick Moser, Assistant Professor in Biomedical Electronics

Nick's Imperial story began in EEE, with the MSc in Analogue and Digital Integrated Circuit Design. He went on to a PhD and postdoctoral research at the Centre for Bio-Inspired Technology with Professor Pantelis Georgiou.

Last year he moved to the Department of Infectious Disease to work with Dr Jesus Rodriguez Manzano, and secured a Google DeepMind Academic Fellowship, using AI to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR). He is CTO of ProtonDx, which he co-founded with Dr Rodriguez Manzano and Professor Georgiou to take portable molecular diagnostics out of the lab.

"Most diagnostic tests measure one marker, from one type of sample, often in a central lab," he says. "Think of a finger-prick glucose test or a COVID lateral flow test: each looks for just one thing. I want to bring many types of sensing and many types of biomarkers together on a single low-cost electronic chip, so testing can happen wherever it is needed, far more often, without redesigning the technology for each new test."

For AMR, this means tracking where and how resistance emerges and spreads, early enough to act and keep antibiotics working for many more years.

Nick also wants to connect Imperial's new Fleming Initiative with the department. "I'd love to hear from EEE colleagues working on circuits, sensors or machine learning who are interested in health applications," he says.

He is now putting together student projects for this academic year across IC design, sensor characterisation and AI modelling. "Any student interested in these areas is welcome to get in touch!"