Before joining KCL, Dr Hector Zenil was at the Universities of Oxford (Structural Biology Group, Department of Computer Science) and Cambridge (Machine Learning Group, Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology), as a faculty member and senior researcher; and with The Alan Turing Institute with which he remains affiliated as an appointed Innovate BridgeAI Independent Advisor. 

Before that, Dr Zenil was an Assistant Professor and Lab leader at the Algorithmic Dynamics Lab, Unit of Computational Medicine, Center for Molecular Medicine and SciLifeLab at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

Dr. Zenil is also a Trustee of the board of the British Society for Research on Ageing, the oldest scientific society devoted to research into the biology of ageing and longevity in the world.

He holds two PhDs, one in Computer Science and one in Logic and Epistemology from Paris 1 Sorbonne/ENS, and Lille 1 in France. His first postdoctoral position in the UK was at the Behavioural and Evolutionary Theory Lab at the University of Sheffield and has been an invited scholar at MIT and Carnegie Mellon.

His main research interests are biosignatures, the dynamics of health and disease, complexity sciences and applications of (algorithmic) information theory to fundamental science and causal AI. He introduced the field of Algorithmic Information Dynamics, a symbolic regression and program synthesis technique that combines classical and algorithmic information theories with causal inference through perturbation analysis to tackle inverse problems, that is to find mechanistic models for natural and physical phenomena based on fundamental first principles.

He is also Academic Entrepreneur in Residence at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering at King's College London (KCL).