Kevin Warwick is an English engineer and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research concerning robotics.
Kevin was born in 1954 in Keresley, Coventry, England, and was raised in the nearby village of Ryton-on-Dunsmore, Warwickshire. His family attended a Methodist church but soon he began doubting the existence of God. He attended Lawrence Sheriff School in Rugby, Warwickshire, where he was a contemporary of actor Arthur Bostrom. He left school at the age of 16 to start an apprenticeship with British Telecom. In 1976, he was granted his first degree at Aston University, followed by a PhD degree and a research job at Imperial College London.
He took up positions at Somerville College in Oxford, Newcastle University, the University of Warwick, and the University of Reading, before relocating to Coventry University in 2014.
Warwick is a Chartered Engineer (CEng), a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET) and a Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute (FCGI). He is Visiting Professor at the Czech Technical University in Prague, the University of Strathclyde, Bournemouth University, and the University of Reading, and in 2004 he was Senior Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois in the United States. He is also on the Advisory Boards of the Instinctive Computing Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter.
By the age of 40, Warwick had been awarded a DSc degree by both Imperial College London and the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, for his research output in two entirely unrelated areas. He has received the IET Achievement Medal, the IET Mountbatten Medal, and in 2011 the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine. In 2000, Warwick presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled The Rise of Robots.
