John Clark

My personal and supervised research work concentrates on aspects of security and software engineering (with a particular interest in applying heuristic computing and other AI to these areas), though I am more eclectic on what I supervise as taught course projects.

I was awarded my PhD in 2002 and promoted to a Personal Chair in January 2005. I have been cited around 3500 times, as far as I can tell. I am a collaborator: DBLP indicates I have 88 co-authors over 87 papers it recognises. Since April 2009 I have been Deputy Head of Department (Responsible for Research). I view my research role largely as helping the people who work with me get on in their careers by producing excellent research. I occasionally think for myself. I am currently engaged in personal research that is exceptionally ambitious but with significant chances of nothing meaningful coming out of it, but then again, if something does....

Most would describe my research work as largely applied, but I have one brain and I have to use it for everything. I don't distinguish too strongly between theory and applied. I am part of the EPSRC's Programme Grant on Dynamic Adaptive Automated Software Engineering (DAASE), led by Mark Harman at UCL.

I believe that “teaching is part of the job". From 2005-2007 I was Chair of Examinations within the Department of Computer Science at York. I was secretary to various Boards of Examiners for around 7 years too. I aim to play as best a part I can in the wider academic community. I have been (taught course) external examiner at eight UK Universities in the past eight years: Open University, King's College London, Sheffield, and Newcastle have now finished; Brunel; Imperial College London, Dublin and University College London are current.

In the past eight years I have also been co-author of eight prize-winning research papers: particular thanks to my PhD students, many of whom I taught as undergraduates. In the past three years I have published or collaborated on proposals with members of every one of our eight research groups.