Rate My Professor Christopher Brewster

Christopher Brewster is Professor of the Application of Emerging Technologies in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Maastricht University, affiliated with the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences and the Institute of Data Science. He concurrently serves as Senior Scientist in the Data Science group at TNO since October 2015 and Scientific Director of the Stichting Green Supply Chain Digital Innovation Hub since January 2022. Brewster obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Sheffield in 2008, with a thesis titled 'Mind the Gap: Bridging from Text to Ontological Knowledge' supervised by Professor Yorick Wilks, and a BA in Theoretical Linguistics from the University of London in 1983. His academic career includes roles as Senior Lecturer in Information Technology at Aston Business School from July 2014 to September 2015, Lecturer there from September 2008 to June 2014, and various lecturing and teaching assistant positions at the University of Sheffield between 2001 and 2005. Earlier, he worked as an English Language Instructor at the University of Patras from 1992 to 2000.

Brewster's research centers on data science and artificial intelligence, encompassing semantic technologies, ontologies and knowledge graphs, interoperability architectures such as Data Spaces, FAIR data principles and Fair Digital Objects, digital twins, knowledge graph maintenance, integration of heterogeneous data for large language models, and the ethics and governance of AI and digital technologies. He applies these to agriculture for environmental and social sustainability, food systems including logistics and supply chains, biodiversity, ecological monitoring, landscape-scale AI, and One Planet initiatives. As Principal Investigator, he leads the Horizon Europe EU-Farmbook project (2022-2029) and BioFIN project (2024-2026); he coordinates the Horizon Europe OpenAgri (2024-2026) and Ambrosia (2024-2027) projects, serves as lead scientist on TNO's Quantifarm projects, and is co-Principal Investigator on the NWO-funded GENIUS AI Lab. Key publications include 'Data sharing in agricultural supply chains: Using semantics to enable sustainable food systems' (2024), 'Geospatial Framework for Assessing the Suitability and Demand for Agricultural Digital Solutions in Europe: A Tool for Informed Decision-Making' (2025), 'Investigating FAIR data principles compliance in horizon 2020 funded Agri-food and rural development multi-actor projects' (2024), 'Investigating the effect of different fine-tuning configuration scenarios on agricultural term extraction using BERT' (2024), and 'Ontology-Based Access Control for FAIR Data' (2020).