A medical robotics and imaging research centre at Imperial College London that works on surgical robots, soft robotics and AI to help patients.
The Hamlyn Centre is a research centre at Imperial College London that develops technology for surgery and healthcare, especially surgical robots. Its research covers imaging, sensing and robotics, and its website lists eleven research groups, including cognitive vision in robotic surgery, soft robotics, a mechatronics in medicine lab, clinical photonics, micro and nano innovation and applied surgical data science. It sits within Imperial's Institute of Global Health Innovation, and it is based in the Bessemer Building on the South Kensington campus in London.
The centre was announced on 5 March 2008, made possible by 10 million pounds in philanthropic support from the Helen Hamlyn Trust and Lady Hamlyn. Professor Lord Ara Darzi and Professor Guang-Zhong Yang were its first co-directors. The centre says it exists to develop safe, effective and accessible technologies that can reshape the future of healthcare, both in developing and developed countries, with a strong focus on clinical translation, meaning getting an idea from the lab to patients, and on direct benefit to patients.
Its early plans included robots to improve keyhole surgery, finding new ways of giving robots human-like intelligence, and tiny microbots with sensing and imaging for cancer treatment. More recent projects include a Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Centre, and past work includes micro-robotics for surgery and the FAIR-SPACE robotics project. The centre also has a Hamlyn Accelerator for Surgical Innovation. Imperial has a link with Smith+Nephew, the medical device company, to speed up innovation in surgical robotics, according to a news report we found, which we did not read in detail.
The Hamlyn Centre describes a mix of people: engineers, computer scientists, surgeons and clinicians working in the same groups. It offers fellowships, secondments and faculty exchange programmes, trains surgeons and engineers in using robotic tools, and runs events such as the Hamlyn Winter School on Surgical Imaging and Vision and the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, which was listed for 2026. It sponsors a podcast called Robot Talk. It also has open-access equipment and training facilities. We did not find a statement of staff numbers or a description of its day-to-day culture.
Jobs at the centre include research engineers and scientists, clinical researchers, software and AI developers, technicians who run the facilities, and event and administrative staff. Students can reach the centre through PhD and MRes programmes for those with technical or clinical backgrounds, including a new MRes in Clinical Robotics and AI listed on its site. Useful school subjects are maths, physics, biology and computing. The centre's own website has the current list of posts and programmes.
Website: www.imperial.ac.uk/hamlyn-centre
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