John Nealon was formerly Associate Dean of the School of Technology (now the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics in the Faculty of Health, Science and Techology) and Head of the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Oxford Brookes University. He aslo undertook tasks as a visiting professor in Turkey and Malaysia, as external examiner at various universities and as a higher education consultant.
He is involved in local community voluntary activities in Headington Neighbourhood Forum (a body similar to a parish council), Highfield Residents Association and, until recently, as Trustee and Treasure of Headington Action.
He has jointly organised a series of workshops on the application of agent technology to healthcare. These include an Agentlink III Technical Forum – Agents in Healthcare (Rome, 1-2 July 2004), an ECAI 2004 workshop on Agents Applied in Health Care (Valencia, August 2004), an IJCAI 2005 workshop Agents Applied in Healthcare and the Fourth Workshop on Agents Applied in Health Care at ECAI 2006 workshop (Riva del Garda, August 2006). He has also edited a special issue of AI Communications (Vol 18, No 3), in which a selection of extended papers from the Valencia workshop were published. Prior to this he was Chair of the Agentcities Working Group on Agents in Healthcare, which held many events and published the group’s research in the Whitestein Series in Software Agent Technologies in 2003. He is an editor emeritus of Expert Update, bulletin of the BCS Specialist Group on AI.
He studied pure mathematics at the University of Sussex and trained to become a college lecturer. He later gained a degree in Psychology and a masters degree in Computer Science. He is a member of the British Computer Society (BCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and formerly an executive committee member of the Council of Professors and Head of Computing (CPHC), the Subject Body for University Computing in Great Britain.
In 1970 he joined the Department of Engineering, Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University), as a mathematics lecturer. In 1973 he was promoted to Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management and Social Studies.
In 1979, following a sabbatical period as a visiting professor at Western Illinois University, near Chicago, he joined the newly formed Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computing (later named the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences).
In 1994 he became the Head of the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, then in 2002 Associate Dean of the School of Technology, retiring from Oxford Brookes University in 2009.