Seán McLoone received his third level education at Queen's University Belfast (QUB), where he was awarded a Master of Engineering Degree with Distinction in Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 1992, a PhD in Control Engineering in 1996 and a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Teaching in 2000.  Following appointments as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (1996-1997) and Lecturer at QUB (1998-2002) he joined the Department of Electronic Engineering in NUI Maynooth in 2002, where he served as Senior Lecturer (2005-2012) and Head of Department (2009-2012). He returned to QUB in January 2013 to take up his current post as Professor and Director of the Energy Power and Intelligent Control (EPIC) Research Cluster in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also Director of the Centre for Intelligent Autonomous Manufacturing Systems (i-AMS), an interdisciplinary pioneer research programme established in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences in QUB in 2016.

At a professional level, Prof McLoone is a Chartered Engineer, a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IET. He is a Past Chairman of the UK and Republic of Ireland (UKRI) Section of the IEEE.  He is a member of the IFAC Technical Committees on Computational Intelligence in Control (TC3.2), and Modelling, Identification and Signal Processing (TC1.1), a member of IET Academic Accreditation Committee and a past Member of the Accreditation Board of Engineers Ireland.  He is currently an Associate Editor for the Transactions of the Institute of Measurement and Control, and serves on the Editorial Board of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence. He is also serving as UG External Examiner at Dublin Institute of Technology for their Electrical Programmes (2015-2018).

Prof McLoone’s research interests are in the general area of intelligent systems with a particular focus on data based modelling and analysis of dynamical systems. This encompasses techniques ranging from classical system identification, fault diagnosis and statistical process control to modern artificial intelligence and biologically inspired adaptive learning algorithms and optimization techniques. His research has a strong application focus, with many projects undertaken in collaboration with industry in areas such as process monitoring, control and optimization, time series prediction and in-line sensor characterization. Current applications are in advanced manufacturing informatics, energy and sustainability.

Prof. McLoone also has an interest in autonomous robotics and was a founding member of Robo Eireann, an inter-disciplinary team of researchers at NUI Maynooth that compete annually in the NAO robot standard platform league of Robocup.