Deputy Head of Department Research,  Electronics and Computer Science

Deputy Director Institue for Life Sciences

Hywel Morgan is professor of Bioelectronics in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton.  He studied Electronic Engineering at the University of Wales, Bangor, after which he completed a PhD in biophysics, graduating in 1985.  After a post-doc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, he moved to the University of Glasgow in 1993 and was promoted to a personal chair in 2001.  In the same year he was awarded a Royal Society-Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship for a sabbatical at the University of Oxford.  In 2003 he moved to Southampton as Professor of Bioelectronics.  From 2013 to 2017 he was a Royal Society Industry Fellow with Sharp Labs Europe. His research interests are in microfluidics and electrokinetics with applications in areas including diagnostics, organ on chip and environmental sensing.

He has published seminal papers on the fundamentals of microfluidics and electrokinetics.  He has over 250 journal publications (H-index = 77), 12 granted patents, and a text-book on AC electrokinetics. He is associate editor of Microfluidics and Nanofluidics. In 2016 he co-founded Vivoplex, a spinout that develops implantable wireless sensors to continually record vital signs.   In 2004 he was awarded the Desty memorial prize for innovation in separation science. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the IET. From 2014 to 2019 he held a Royal Society Wolfson research merit award. In 2019 he was elected a Fellow of Learned Society of Wales.

In 2020 he co-directed a team that developed a personal respirator during the COVID19 pandemic (PeRSo). The project was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering President’s Medal for Pandemic Service.  In 2020 he received an MBE for services to biomedical engineering in the Queen's Birthday Honours.