Dr Utete is the acting Research Leader of the Mobile Intelligent Autonomous Systems (MIAS) group at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa. The MIAS group carries out robotics research. Dr. Utete received a DPhil in Engineering Science (Robotics) from the University of Oxford in 1995. She also holds an MSc in Computation from the Computing Laboratory, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Oxford (1992) and a BSc Honours degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Zimbabwe (1990). She was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship which she held at Balliol College, Oxford from 1991 to 1994. She was also awarded a Balliol College Jowett Exhibition (1994-1995) and a Wingate Scholarship (1994-1995). Subsequently, she was awarded the Lady Wolfson Junior Research Fellowship in Engineering Science at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford which she held from 1995 to 1998. During tenure of the Fellowship, she worked on problems in mobile robotics. She later worked as a Research Assistant in the Signal Processing and Neural Networks Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford; she worked there with colleagues from the University of Oxford, Rolls-Royce plc and Oxford Bio-Signals Ltd on the development of prototype systems for aircraft engine condition monitoring. She is a co-inventor, with Oxford and Rolls-Royce colleagues, of a patent on monitoring of the health of a power plant.