Westcott was educated at
Wandsworth Grammar School, the
City and Guilds College, both in London, and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His career began in
radar research during
World War II. After a year in Germany with the
Allied Commission, he obtained a scholarship to the
MIT where many scientists returning from the services were addressing the early possibilities of computer applications. He was the first to lecture on the new field of
cybernetics in Britain and was a member of the
Ratio Club with
Grey Walter,
Alan Turing,
Giles Brindley and others from various fields, who met between 1949 and 1952 to discuss brain mechanisms and related issues. He researched
servo-mechanisms at
Imperial College London, where he headed the new
Department of Computing and Control from 1966. A founder-member in 1957 of the
International Federation of Automatic Control, one of the first professional bodies to liaise successfully across the
Iron Curtain, he was a consultant to companies such as
Shell,
ICI, Westlands and
British Steel Corporation in applying control systems to large and complex processes. In the 1970s and 1980s he also worked on macro-economic modelling and computer modelling for policy-evaluation. ==Awards and honours==