Dr. Kier Dugan is an accomplished technologist, engineer, and scientist whose experience includes supercomputing, embedded systems, robotics, and highly-autonomous vehicles.  He holds a PhD in Electronic Engineering from the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science.  His publications focus primarily on fault-tolerance, application architecture, and hardware-in-the-loop modeling for massively-parallel supercomputing systems.  His interests include high-performance computing, system architectural design, robotics, and the future of computing.

Professionally, his career has allowed him to utilise his academic experience for autonomous vehicles.  For the past decade, Kier has led software and control systems teams through the varied and interesting challenges of human-machine teaming: deploying autonomous vehicles in human-centric environments in a collaborative manner.

Alongside all of this, Kier is a broad gamer: TTRPGs, video games, board games; ancient or contemporary; simple or complex.  Classics like Command & Conquer are the reason he started learning to program, and he has been fascinated with how gameplay, rulesets, and story complement technical skills ever since.