Daniel Coca

Principal Investigator

Daniel is Professor of Nonlinear and Complex Systems with over 25 years’ experience in the field of engineering and higher education. Before joining Newcastle as Head of School of Engineering, he was Head of the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, a post he held for eight years.  

Daniel has extensive expertise in system identification and control of complex systems as well as signal processing, data analytics and machine learning using reconfigurable and GPU computing platforms. He has developed theory, methodology and algorithms to analyse, model and control fluid flows, reaction-diffusion systems, crystal growth processes and stem cell differentiation and pioneered the application of high-performance FPGA-based reconfigurable computers for real-time peptide mass fingerprinting, protein identification and quantitation. Funded by BBSRC and NSF in the US, he jointly led the development of the “Fruit Fly Brain Observatory”, a GPU-enabled platform for data analysis, modelling, simulation and visualisation of the fruit fly brain, which won the first phase of the Open Science Prize in 2016 and was included in the BBSRC Impact Showcase 2020. 

He is member of the executive board of the Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure (DAFNI) and Co-Director of the Urban Flows Observatory, which he helped establish as part of a £10 million investment from the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC). 

Daniel has won research grants with a value of over £50 million from EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC, US National Science Foundation and the Human Frontiers Science Program.