Lionel Tarassenko

BA Engineering Science 1978
DPhil Medical Electronics 1985
Honorary Fellow
President, Reuben College
CBE

Lionel Tarassenko was born in Paris of a French mother and Ukrainian-Latvian father. He moved to England at the age of 13 when his father, a nuclear physicist, came to work on a European research project. Five years later, he arrived at Keble to read Engineering Science. After graduating, he joined an industrial electronics R&D lab before going back to France for his National Service. He became a British citizen in 1981 and, in that same year, returned to Oxford (and Keble) for a DPhil in medical electronics in the Department of Paediatrics.

He held a joint appointment between a University spin-out company and Magdalen College before he was appointed in 1988 as a University Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow in Engineering at St Hugh’s College. He was elected to the Chair of Electrical Engineering, with a Professorial Fellowship at St John’s, in 1997. He became the founding Director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (sited on the medical campus in Headington) in 2008, before being persuaded to come back down the hill to become the Head of the Department of Engineering Science from 2014 to 2019. After spinning out four companies from his research lab since 2000, he had no hesitation in accepting the Vice-Chancellor’s offer to become the founding President of Oxford’s 39th college, Parks (now Reuben) College, which he describes as “his fifth start-up”.

Having been a member of five colleges during his Oxford career, Lionel is immensely proud to be an Honorary Fellow of Keble, as it is his early years at Keble that have shaped him. “College life introduced me to the concept of multi-disciplinarity, which has been a recurring theme throughout my career. Playing football for Keble also helped me develop the resilience and reliance on teamwork which are required to lead successful multi-disciplinary research teams.”