Professor Bashir M. Al-Hashimi CBE FREng FRS

Professor Bashir M. Al-Hashimi is Vice President (Research & Innovation) at King’s College London, where he provides the academic leadership for developing and implementing the university's research and innovation strategy and overseeing new initiatives, whilst continuing to foster inter-faculty and multidisciplinary collaboration to support delivery of King’s strategic goals.

He served previously as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences at King’s after undertaking a similar Executive Dean role at the University of Southampton, where he was also a member of the University’s Executive Board.

Bashir is a renowned world-leading computer engineer, who has made significant contributions to understanding the interactions between hardware and software of energy-constrained computing and its application in industrial designs. He is acknowledged internationally in the field of energy-efficient computing and systems engineering and his research has won numerous academic awards and widespread external recognition. He has played a prominent role in the development of battery-free computing that underpins a broad range of digital technologies as an emerging field, such as the internet of things.

Having received a CBE in 2018 for his services to engineering research and industry, in May 2023 Bashir became a fellow of the Royal Society for his pioneering work on semiconductor chips and energy-efficient computation. In the same year he was also elected to the fellowship of the European Academy of Science and Arts. In 2020, he was awarded the Faraday Medal by the IET for seminal theoretical and experimental contributions to manufacturing test of system-on-chip, pioneering new test data and low power compression methods and algorithms for energy-efficient computing. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2013 and as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering in 2011. In 2021, Bashir was elected as a Royal Academy of Engineering Board Trustee and joined the ERA Foundation Board as a Director.

Prior to joining King’s, Bashir served at the University of Southampton as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences from August 2018 - March 2020, following his role as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering from 2014 - 2018.

Bashir is also a passionate advocate of equality and inclusion with humility and championing diversity in both higher education and within the STEM professions.

Research interests

Bashir is an interdisciplinary researcher, he has led successfully a number of large-scale interdisciplinary research programmes funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and industry. As an example, he was the principal investigator of an EPSRC Programme Grant which was cited as an exemplar of interdisciplinary research. He has published over 350 technical papers and authored or co-authored 7 books. He served on the Research Excellence Framework 2014 Electrical, Electronics and Materials Panel and served again in 2021 as a member of the Engineering Panel.

His experience includes facilitation of the academic-industry interface; in 2008 he founded the Arm-ECS industry-academia centre of research excellence – a collaboration between researchers at the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and Arm Research, Cambridge. The centre is the largest supported by Arm and the centre model for collaboration has now been replicated in the UK and overseas. Bashir has established numerous international research collaborations and has also applied successfully with colleagues from Imperial College to build an international centre to centre research consortia in Spatial Computational Learning, as a new EPSRC funding initiative for UK research groups to partner the best international leading researchers.