Alan Faulkner-Jones is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University. Since 2023 he has been the Senior Programme Director / Global Head of Mechanical Engineering at Heriot Watt. Previously he was the Programme Director of the Graduate Apprenticeship (GA) programme BEng (Hons) Engineering: Design & Manufacture and GA coordinator for the other GA programmes in the School of Engineering & Physical Sciences (EPS) - BEng (Hons) Engineering: Instrumentation, Measurement & Control and BSc (Hons) Data Science.

Alan received his MEng (2010) and PhD (2015) degrees from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.  His undergraduate Masters degree was in Robotics & Cybertronics (a multi-disciplinary area between Mechanical, Electrical and Software Engineering), and his PhD applied this engineering knowledge to creating micro-scale 3D biological tissues from human pluripotent stem cells using custom built valve-based bioprinting platforms for applications in animal-free drug development and personalised medicine.

Alan's research explores the potential of creating micro-scale 3D biological tissues from human pluripotent stem cells using custom built valve-based bioprinting platforms and is based in the Biomedical Microengineering Group at Heriot-Watt University’s Institute of Biological Chemistry, Biophysics and Bioengineering. During his PhD he spent a month as a visiting scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing testing novel biomaterials with his bioprinter.