A leading expert in the application of signal processing and machine learning to healthcare, he has been the president of Reuben College, Oxford, since 2019.

[17] Tarassenko was the driving force behind the creation of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering (IBME) at the University of Oxford, which he directed from its opening in 2008 to 2012.

[19] Under his leadership, the IBME grew from 110 to 220 academic researchers and it was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education in 2015 for “new collaborations between engineering and medicine delivering benefit to patients”.

[22] Together with Professor Alan Murray of University of Edinburgh, Tarassenko is the inventor of the pulse-stream technique for analogue implementation of massively parallel neural networks.

With his research team, he designed the QUICK system, which was at the core of Rolls-Royce’s engine health monitoring strategy in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

When he became the first Director of the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering in 2008, Tarassenko focused his research on patient monitoring, both in and out of hospital.

[31] He was created Baron Tarassenko, of Headington in the City of Oxford, on 10 June 2024,[32] and was introduced to the House of Lords on 29 July as a crossbencher.

He received the 2015 Martin Black Prize from the Institute of Physics for the best paper in Physiological Measurement [3] He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to engineering and a 'Chevalier dans l'Ordre national du Mérite' by the French state in 2021.

[21][36][37] In the same year, Tarassenko married Anne Elizabeth Le Grice (née Moss), with whom he has two stepsons and a stepdaughter.