Dr Jon Cobb

Dr Cobb’s passion for electronic technology has been a consistent theme throughout his professional career, encompassing such diverse fields as biomedical engineering, and artificial intelligence. “I was fortunate to commence by professional life at the same time as the microelectronics revolution started and was immediately enthralled by the possibilities of the silicon chip”. This led to a position in a microelectronics design centre followed by a scholarship to study for a Masters in Microelectronics at the University of Southampton. “At that time Digital Signal Processing (DSP) was an emerging field offering great potential and I developed microcontroller and FPGA based DSP solutions. “

Cobb then commenced a part-time doctorate and worked with medical physicists at Poole and Salisbury hospitals investigating application of new technologies in diabetes and stroke. “The PhD work was a fantastic experience that absorbed my thoughts for many years, achieving a novel solution and especially one designed to help patients was very fulfilling.” Having completed the PhD and achieving Chartered Engineer status, Cobb chose to remain in academia. “I secured a prestigious EPSRC grant to further develop a blood flow sensor.” This work provided a basis for a series of related PhD investigations supervised by Cobb. “Supervising research students brings great satisfaction, inspiring others with your own hard won knowledge and skills; sharing insight into the scientific method and satisfying the desire for challenge and progress.”

Recently, Cobb has diversified into a broad range of application areas “Many of the challenges of the underlying technology have been resolved and the challenge is now more in the application domain. I have projects that use similar instrumentation to provide solutions in stroke rehabilitation, swimming performance analysis and computer games interfaces. Such a multi-disciplinary approach brings new insight, opportunities and motivation.”