Professor Robin Purshouse

School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Professor of Decision Sciences

Robin Purshouse
Profile picture of Robin Purshouse
r.purshouse@sheffield.ac.uk
Amy Johnson Building

Full contact details

Professor Robin Purshouse
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Amy Johnson Building
Portobello Street
Sheffield
S1 3JD
Profile

Robin Purshouse received the MEng degree in Control Systems Engineering in 1999 and a PhD in Control Systems in 2004, both from the University of Sheffield. His doctoral studies, under the supervision of Peter Fleming, pioneered the research field of many-objective optimization. Robin worked in industry (in roles at Logica, PA Consulting, and Rolls-Royce), before returning to the University of Sheffield in 2008 as Research Fellow in Health Economics and Decision Modelling. In this role he was lead developer for the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model, which has gone on to become one of the most prominent computational models used to inform population health policy decision making. He was subsequently appointed Lecturer (2010), Senior Lecturer (2014), Reader in Decision Modelling and Optimization (2017) and Professor of Decision Sciences (2020) in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering. He continues in this role in the new School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Robin’s research sits at the interface of computational modelling, optimization, and systems science. He was awarded an ESRC Future Research Leaders Award (2012-15) for the project ‘Complex systems modelling of alcohol consumption dynamics in the British population’. He was subsequently Principal Investigator for the NIH R01 project ‘CASCADE: Calibrated agent simulations for combined analysis of drinking etiologies’ (2016-22), founding Co-Director for the UKPRP research consortium ‘SIPHER: Systems-science informed public health and economic research for non-communicable disease prevention’ (2019-25), and is now Co-PI for the NIHR project ‘NOURISH: The impact of food environment policies and food insecurity on less healthy food consumption, obesity and health economic outcomes – a model-based appraisal’ (2024-27). He is also Sheffield lead investigator for the CRUK programme grant ‘Targeting multiple levels of ‘the smoking cessation system’ using novel scientific approaches’ (2022-27), a further NIH R01 project ‘SIMAH: A microsimulation of alcohol control interventions to advance health equity and reverse the current decrease in life expectancy in the US’ (2020-25), and the UKRI interdisciplinary research cluster ‘HealthMod: Enhancing policy modelling capabilities to tackle the economic determinants of health and health inequality’ (2024-28).

Research interests
  • Computational modelling of complex social systems
  • Agent-based modelling, machine learning, and uncertainty quantification methods for generative and inverse generative social science
  • Decision modelling for population health policy appraisal and evaluation
  • Evolutionary multi-objective optimization and multi-criteria decision-making
  • Bayesian optimization and multidisciplinary optimization for the design of complex engineered products and processes.
Publications

Journal articles

Conference proceedings

Preprints

Grants

Current Grants

  • The HealthMod Cluster: Enhancing Policy Modelling Capabilities to Tackle the Economic Determinants of Health and Health Inequality, MRC, 04/2023 - 03/2028, £9,055,452, as Co-I
  • Targeting multiple levels of ‘the smoking cessation system’ using novel scientific approaches, CRUK, 04/2022 - 03/2027, £531,098, as PI
  • Intervention development for community-based self-referred social prescribing, RCUK, 06/2021 - 11/2022, £181,653, as Co-PI
  • A microsimulation of alcohol control interventions to advance health equity and
    reverse the current decrease in life expectancy in the US, NIH, 10/2020 - 09/2025, $332,505, as sub award PI
  • System-science Informed Public Health and Economic Research for Non-communicable Disease Prevention (the SIPHER Consortium), 09/2019 - 03/2025, £6,926,749, as co-PI

Previous Grants

  • Developing a proof-of-concept agent-based model of the relationship between food advertising and food choices in England, RCUK, 09/2022 - 03/2023, £24,990, as Co-PI
  • SIPHER – Systems science in Public health and Health Economic Research, Research England, 04/2021 - 03/2022, as PI
  • Many-objective Optimisation Pilot Project, Industrial, 10/2018 - 05/2019, £64,720, as PI
  • Consortium Developmental Grant,  UK Prevention Research Partnership, 07/2018 - 11/2018, £46,105, as Co-I
  • DYNAMO: DYNamic Analysis Modelling and Optimisation of GDI Engines, 04/2018 - 06/2021, £401,252, as PI
  • Liger - an Open-source Integrated Optimisation Environment, Digital Engineering and Test Centre, 01/2018 - 05/2019, £60,000, as PI
  • CASCADE: Calibrated Agent Simulations for Combined Analysis of Drinking Etiologies, NIAAA, 08/2016 - 04/2022, $2,313,250, as PI
  • Optimization for robust design: Integrating model-based systems engineering with multi-criteria decision-making support in a distributed framework, EPSRC, 05/2014 - 05/2018, £1,074,429, as co-PI
  • ASUR hybrid power packs, Industrial, 10/2013 - 03/2014, £29,991, as PI
  • Value-based Bayesian sequential analysis for fault monitoring, EPSRC, 01/2013 - 08/2014, £18,099, as co-PI
  • Complex systems modelling of alcohol consumption dynamics in the British population, ESRC, 10/2012 - 09/2014, £173,428, as PI
  • Alcohol policy modelling and evaluation, MRC, 11/2010 - 10/2013, £1,034,163, as co-PI
Teaching activities
  • ACS6132 - Agent Based Modelling
Professional activities and memberships
  • Association for Computing Machinery (2017-present)
  • Research Society on Alcohol (2016-present)

Links

Presentations from the EMO 2013 conference  Information and Communication Engineering