rew Bangham, Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia and head of its Computer Sciences department died on August 16, aged 67, after unsuccessful treatments for prostate cancer.

Andrew Bangham, Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia and head of its Computer Sciences department died on August 16, aged 67, after unsuccessful treatments for prostate cancer.

He was raised in Cambridge, the eldest of four children, and went on to do his PhD in Biophysics at University College London, after a spell at Duke University in North Carolina where he had a paper published.

He sailed back to the UK to begin studying medicine at UCL, but switched to physiology on his first day, and joined UEA's Biology department as a post-doc in 1973.

Among the many achievements during his distinguished career, he built a signal processing system which would go on to be commercialized as the Soft Oscilloscope and invented a teaching robot which still in production today.

His passion split between biology and computer science, he set up the D'Arcy Thompson Centre for Computational Biology at UEA.

Housed in the Centre is the UEA Computational Biology Laboratory which promotes integration between computing and biology.

In 2000, he started collaborating with Professor Enrico Coen at the John Innes Centre, studying plant growth, trying to determine why things grow the way they do.

Their successful partnership lead to international research to try to understand the relationship between genes, growth and form.

Friend and colleague Dr Richard Harvey paid tribute, saying: 'Andrew was an extremely vigorous researcher, full of fresh ideas and a wide-ranging set of interests including sailing, art, music and science.

'His time at UEA was characterised by a wide variety of collaborations and new initiatives including several spin-out companies, consultancies and public engagements. He was passionately fond of his family and will be remembered by many colleagues as a generous host, humane individual and above all clever, imaginative and wise.'

Aside from the sciences, Andrew's passion was sailing, particularly at Barton and Wroxham Broads with his family, and he was a self-taught engineer.

Andrew is survived by his wife Kate, daughters Jenny and Sarah and one granddaughter.

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