Nicholas Robert Jennings is a British computer scientist and the current Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University. He was previously the Vice-Provost for Research and Enterprise at Imperial College London, the UK's first Regius Professor of Computer Science, and the inaugural Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government on National Security. His research covers the areas of AI, autonomous systems, agent-based computing and cybersecurity. He is involved in a number of startups including Aerogility, Contact Engine, Crossword Cyber Security, and Reliance Cyber Science. He is also an adviser to Darktrace, a member of the UK Government's AI Council, chair of the National Engineering Policy Centre and a council member for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Education and early life Jennings was born in London. He grew up on the Isle of Portland in Dorset and attended Weymouth Grammar School. He studied for an undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Exeter and his PhD was from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Queen Mary, University of London. Research and career His research is on developing AI systems for large-scale, open and dynamic environments. In particular, he focuses on endowing individual autonomous agents with the ability to act and interact in flexible ways and with building systems that contain both humans and software agents. He has been involved with deployments of systems in domains such as business process management, smart energy systems, sensor networks, disaster response, telecommunications, citizen science and eDefence—and generally advocating the area of agent-oriented software engineering. His most recent project, ORCHID, developed the science of Human-Agent Collectives (HACs) in which humans and software agents collaborate in seamless partnerships. In undertaking this research, he has attracted grant income of £33M, published more than 700 articles (with over 400 co-authors) and graduated over 50 PhD students (including two winners and one runner-up of the British Computer Society (BCS)/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Award.) He has over 90,000 citations in Google Scholar and an h-index of 130. From 1988 he was at Queen Mary, University of London, where he was a PhD student, lecturer, reader and professor. In 1999, he moved to the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton where he was the Deputy Head of Department, the Associate Dean (Research and Enterprise) for the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Maths, the Head of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group and the Head of