My name is Andrew Hills, and I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre (UTC) in Control, Monitoring and Systems Engineering, within the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Sheffield.
I lead the Systems and Architectures work theme, which spans embedded and desktop software development, data analytics, machine learning, cybersecurity and the cloud. In practice, this means building the sensing hardware, software and algorithms that keep the next generation of large civil gas turbine engines healthy — everything from embedded SoC devices through to cloud computing infrastructure — and finding better ways to turn raw sensor data into decisions. As theme lead, I regularly report and present research activities to senior management within Rolls-Royce.
Alongside the research, I wear a DevOps and systems-administration hat: I've architected, configured and administer much of our team's infrastructure, including centralised storage and backup, GitLab and GitLab runners, authentication, monitoring stacks (TIG and ELK), Mattermost, auto-deployment systems and Microsoft Azure, along with the IT security and administrative policies around them.
How I got here
I've spent my research career at the University of Sheffield, in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering. I completed an MEng in Computer Systems Engineering (2002–2006) and a PhD in Control Systems Engineering, awarded in November 2013 for a thesis titled Cover Tree-based Fast Novelty Detection and Classification for Applications with Big Data.
My first research post came in 2010 on the BearInspect project, funded by the Northern Wind Innovation Programme, developing automated novelty-detection algorithms for acoustic-emission and vibration data from an operational wind turbine. Further research associate roles followed: an industry-sponsored project with Dr Roderich Gross (2012), an EPSRC-funded pipe-condition-monitoring project developing ultrasonic ground-condition algorithms (2012–13), and the BIMPA / SpiNNaker neuromorphic-computing project (2013–14), where I built a ray tracer that runs on SpiNNaker hardware and tools for distributing scenery efficiently across its many cores.
In December 2014 I joined the Rolls-Royce UTC as a research associate, working on embedded wireless sensor systems for large civil gas turbine engines and the analysis tools and infrastructure behind a bespoke equipment health-management platform. In September 2017 I became a research fellow, initially leading research in health management technologies, and from December 2019 leading the Systems and Architectures theme.
Across these years I've also applied the same data-modelling toolkit well beyond aerospace: I developed the Arthritis Research UK risk calculator, a website giving personalised risk scores for patients facing knee or hip surgery (with modelling by researchers at Sheffield and Bristol), and I led a National Joint Registry project — a collaboration with Northgate Public Services (now NEC Software Solutions) — making research data available to researchers while giving the NJR tools to control their data.
Alongside research, I've supervised undergraduate, taught-postgraduate and research-postgraduate projects, and I served as local chair for the 12th UKACC International Conference on Control (Control 2018), where I designed and developed the conference website and publishing material. Since 2022 I've also been a director of Hills Family Ltd, doing end-to-end software development, system architecture and server-infrastructure work for client projects.
Awards
Rolls-Royce Inventors Scheme award · July 2026 Personal award made by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sheffield, in conjunction with the Rolls-Royce Inventors Scheme, recognising contribution to the company. The award follows the filing of two patent applications on engine health monitoring.
Outside research
Most of my time outside work is spent with my wife, Jay — walking, trying new cafés and restaurants, watching films, and exploring places we haven't been before. We've been travelling more and more, and a holiday in Amsterdam left a lasting impression on us both. Family matters a great deal to us too, and much of our time goes to our parents and in-laws.
Jay is a software engineer, so a fair amount of conversation ends up on new developments, integrations and whatever either of us is building at the time. Some of that spills into my own company, which has become the main home for the side of my work that isn't academic.
There are things I've made less time for than I'd like — photography, cooking, the piano — but they're set aside rather than given up.