Professor Guang-Zhong Yang was the founder and director of the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London, UK. Professor Yang’s main research interests are in medical imaging, sensing and robotics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, fellow of IEEE, IET, AIMBE, IAMBE, MICCAI, CGI and a recipient of the Royal Society Research Merit Award and listed in The Times Eureka ‘Top 100’ in British Science. Professor Yang is the founding editor of Science Robotics (http://robotics.sciencemag.org/) – a journal of the Science family dedicated to the latest advances in robotics and how it enables or underpins new scientific discoveries. He was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s 2017 New Year Honour for his contribution to biomedical engineering.