2012 New Year Honours List

Professor Geoffrey Hill (Keble 1950) distinguished poet, critic and Honorary Fellow has been knighted for his services to literature.

Upon graduation from Keble with a first, he embarked on an academic career, teaching at the University of Leeds from 1954 until 1980. After leaving Leeds, he spent a year at the University of Bristol on a Churchill Scholarship before becoming a teaching Fellow at Emanuel College, Cambridge where he taught from 1981 until 1988. He then moved to the US, to serve as University Professor and Professor of Literature and Religion at Boston University. In 2006, he moved back to Cambridge, England.

Professor Hill was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the University of Leeds in 1988. He is also an Honorary Fellow of Emanuel College and Keble College; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and since 1996 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in June 2010.

Professor Lionel Tarassenko (Keble 1975) has been awarded a CBE for services to engineering.

Professor Tarassenko gained the degrees of BA in Engineering Science in 1978, and DPhil in Medical Electronics in 1985, both from the University of Oxford. He then held a number of positions in academia and industry, before taking up a University Lecturership in Oxford in 1988. Since then, he has devoted most of his research effort to the development of signal processing techniques and their application to diagnostic systems, especially in the context of medical problems.

He has been the holder of the Chair in Electrical Engineering at Oxford University since October 1997. He was elected to a Fellowship of the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE) in 1996, when he was also awarded the IEE Mather Premium for his work on neural networks, and to a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2000. He received a British Computer Society Medal in 1996 for his work on neural network analysis of sleep disorders. His research on jet engine health monitoring was awarded the Rolls-Royce Chairman's Award for Technical Innovation in 2001 and the Sir Henry Royce High Value Patent Award in 2008. His work on mobile phones for healthcare was highly commended at the Medical Futures Innovation Awards in 2003 and was awarded the E-health 2005 Innovation Award for “best device to empower patients”. He was awarded the 2006 Silver Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering for his contribution to British engineering leading to market exploitation and he also won the Institute of Engineering & Technology IT Award for "Data Fusion Software for Early Detection of Patient Deterioration" in the same year.

Professor Tarassenko is the author of 140 refereed publications, 150 conference papers, 3 books and 24 patents. He was a founder director of Third Phase (now sold to Cmed) in December 1999, of Oxford BioSignals Ltd in May 2000 and of e-San Ltd (then t+ Medical) in February 2002. He is a member of EPSRC’s Digital Economy Ethics Advisory Panel and of the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Sub-Panel for the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) assessment, and he is the Chair of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Biomedical Engineering Panel. He is the Bioengineering theme leader for the joint NHS/University of Oxford Biomedical Research Centre, the Director of the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering since April 2008, and the Director of the Centre of Excellence in Medical Engineering jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and EPSRC since October 2009.

Professor Tarassenko is Professorial Fellow in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at St John’s College Oxford.