In his long and productive research career at Imperial College London, Bruce Sayers served both as Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Imperial College and later as Head of the Department of Computing. A leading world-class research scientist and someone who really cared about students and education, he became Dean of the City and Guilds College, which includes all the engineering departments at Imperial, for two separate terms.

Bruce Sayers was born in London in 1928 and subsequently emigrated with his parents to Australia. He was brought up in Melbourne and attended Melbourne University - where he graduated with a first class degree in Physics and Electrical Engineering. Sayers worked for several years after graduating as an electronics design engineer before coming to Imperial College as a research student under Professor Colin Cherry. He joined the staff of the College in 1962 and became Professor of Engineering Applied to Medicine in 1968.

In the mid-1960s he established the Engineering in Medicine Laboratory, which, under his leadership, became world famous as a centre for research involving the application of engineering and physical science to biomedical problems. Sayers was, arguably, the father of the field of biomedical signal processing, which today is central to many areas of diagnosis involving medical scanners and other electronic instruments. Sayers and Colin Caro were the founders of research at Imperial College involving the application of engineering and physical science to biomedical problems. Their laboratories became the College's Centre for Biological and Medical Systems in 1989 and a full department of the College (the Department of Bioengineering) in the late 1990s.

Sayers published many important research papers on the application of signal processing and statistical techniques to biomedical problems. He was for many years heavily involved in work with the World health Organisation (WHO) on studying the spread of various diseases. Throughout the 1990s he worked for the WHO's Advisory Committee on Health Research (ACHR), chairing several subcommittees (on science and technology, on health and the economy and on health measurement), serving also as ACHR vice-chairman. The committee is a statutory body of WHO, with a 50-year documented history, and has counted in its membership some 15 Nobel Laureates. More recently, Sayers co-edited a book on Global Health, as well as an online UNESCO-sponsored Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems. He continued this work right up until his death.

Sayers was a dedicated teacher and held in deep affection by his students. In the mid-1960s he started a one year Diploma of Imperial College (DIC) Course on quantitative methods (particularly signal processing) applied to medicine. The course, which ran for many years, attracted some of the brightest young doctors from around the world. Graduates of the DIC course went on to become some of the world's leading clinicians. What Sayers and his colleagues taught these students has had a profound effect on medical education and practice worldwide.

He received many academic honours throughout his long career and presented numerous lectures at leading universities and conferences around the world. He was a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Throughout his career, Sayers was very much an Imperial College man, devoting a large amount of his time to student and City and Guilds activities.

Bruce Sayers, electrical engineer, was born on February 6, 1928. He died on May 12, 2008, aged 80