Nick Jennings

Professor Nick Jennings is vice chancellor and president at Loughborough University. He is also an internationally recognized authority in the areas of AI, autonomous systems, cybersecurity, and agent-based computing. He was awarded the 2026 Research Excellence Award by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. His research focuses on developing agentic AI systems for large-scale, open and dynamic environments. In particular, he is interested in how to endow individual autonomous agents with the ability to act and interact in flexible ways and with effectively engineering systems that contain both humans and software agents. Nick is passionate about the real-world impact of research and his systems have been deployed to save lives in the aftermath of disasters, to win Olympic medals for TeamGB, and to monitor the impact of climate change on glaciers. He has also been involved with a number of start-ups including Aerogility, Darktrace, Sentient Sports, Reliance Cyber Systems, Trans Humanity, and is a board member of Midlands Mindforge.