Caroline Hargrove

Caroline Hargrove CBE FREng (née Hogue,^[1] born March 1968^[2]) is Chief Technical Officer of Ceres Power. She previously served as CTO at Zedsen, Babylon Health, McLaren Applied Technologies and as a visiting professor at the University of Oxford.^[3][4]

Hargrove is from Montreal, Quebec.^[5] She studied mathematics and mechanical engineering at Queen's University, Ontario, which she graduated in 1989.^[1][6] She moved to the University of Cambridge for her postgraduate studies, earning a PhD^[7] for research on computer modelling of granular materials supervised by David Newland [Wikidata] in 1993.^[8][6]

After her postgraduate studies, Hargrove remained at the University of Cambridge as a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College.^[9][10] She joined McLaren in 1997, where she worked in vehicle dynamics.^[11] For ten years she was responsible for the McLaren F1 simulator.^[9] She was one of the founders of McLaren Applied Technologies^[12] as Programme Director in 2007, then Technical Director in 2013 and CTO in 2018.^[13] Her job involved R&D strategy and IP development.^[14] She championed the use of big data in motor racing.^[15] She helped translate the technology of McLaren F1 to medical services, developing analysis and support tools.^[16][17][18] She worked with Olympic athletes and the UK track cycling team.^{[1][11][19][20]} She created a data-logger that mounts under the saddle to collect information of speed, power, tilt and torque, then send it to the coach.^[5] Her team translated the 3D accelerometers from Formula One cars into sensors for human use, working with GlaxoSmithKline to monitor patient's response to drugs.^[21][22] In 2016 she announced the use of their simulator for testing domestic vehicles.^[23]

She was a Visiting Professor in the Nuffield Department of Surgery at Oxford University from 2015-2018.^[24]

In 2018 she became the CTO of Babylon Health, focussing on the use of AI to diagnose patients.^[25]

In April 2021 she was named as CTO of Zedsen, a UK based startup that provides non-invasive blood sugar monitoring technology.^[26]

Later that year she joined Ceres Power (developers of fuel cell and green hydrogen technology) as Chief Technology Officer, having been a non-executive director of the company for the previous three years.^[27] She remained as a non-executive at Zedsen.

Hargrove is an advocate for increasing the number of girls and women in engineering through visits to schools and on-site work experience.^[28][29]

In 2016 Hargrove was named one of the Women's Engineering Society and The Daily Telegraph's Top 50 Influential Women in Engineering.^[30]

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2017,^[31][24] and was subsequently profiled in the in-house magazine Ingenia.^[32] In the same year she was announced as one of the Top 50 Innovators in the World by Codex.^[33]

She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to engineering.^[34]

In 2023 she was awarded an honorary degree from Queen's University.^[35]

In 2014 she appeared on BBC Radio 4, where she discussed how Britain became a world leader in Formula One cars.^[36]

She was the subject of The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4 hosted by Jim Al-Khalili on 20 November 2018.^[37]

on 6 March 2020 The BBC World Service featured Hogue on their World Wise Web series being interviewed by a 16 year old motor racing fan about the F1 simulator.^[38]

• Profile of Caroline Hargrove by Michael Kenward