Advisory Board

ECIT’s activities are overseen by an advisory board comprising local and international industrialists and senior researchers from worldwide universities:

Dr Norman Apsley

Dr Apsley was educated at Larne Grammar School and at the New University of Ulster where he achieved a First Class Honours Degree in Physics. Later, he studied amorphous semiconductors at Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratories. Dr Apsley became a Fellow of Jesus College and an SERC Research Fellow.

Professional appointments include board membership of Investment Belfast, the University of Ulster Science and Research Park and the Northern Ireland Centre for Entrepreneurship. He was appointed an Honorary Professor at the University of Essex in 1989 and is also a visiting Professor for the University of Ulster.

Dr Hugh Cormican

Dr Hugh Cormican is the managing director-  and one of the original founders - of Andor Technology. A Fellow of the Institute of Physics, he originally studied Laser Physics at Queen’s University Belfast and it was during his PhD studies that he took the opportunity to be involved in the start-up of Andor Technology. 

Dr Cormican has acted as the managing director of the company since its inception.  Throughout his career, he has availed of further learning opportunities in market awareness, leadership, finance and total quality. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Queen’s University in July 2003.

Dr Franz Dielacher

Franz Dielacher received his MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Graz, Austria, in 1981 and 1990 respectively. Since 1994, his main focus has been high-speed digital communications. Current research interests include RF- mixed-signal IC design, telecom-system-integration and design methodologies.

He has worked in circuit design and concept engineering including standardisation for wireline and wireless communications. Dr Dielacher is currently chief scientist for telecom circuits at Infineon Technologies.

He has been a member of the IEEE ISSCC program committee since 1999; is currently the ISSCC Wireline subcommittee chair and is a member of ESSCIRC’s steering committee.

Prof Michael J Flynn

Professor Flynn began his engineering career at IBM as a designer of mainframe computers and while there received his PhD from Purdue University in 1961. In 1975, he became Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford where he set up the Stanford Architecture and Arithmetic group. Some of his best-known work includes the development of the stream outline of computer organisation (SIMD, etc) and techniques for the simultaneous execution of multiple instructions.
 
Prof Flynn received the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchley Award and the Harry Goode Memorial Award for his contributions to computer architecture. He was awarded an honorary DSc from the University of Dublin and is a fellow of both the IEEE and ACM.

Prof Steve Furber

Prof. Steve Furber (PI) is ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. Previously he worked in the R&D department at Acorn Computers, and was a principal designer of the BBC Micro and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor. The ARM is now the world’s leading 32-bit embedded processor with over ten billion shipped to date. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the BCS, the IET and the IEEE. He was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal in 2003, a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2004, the IET Faraday Medal in 2007, and a CBE in 2008.

Prof Andy Hopper

Andy Hopper is Professor of Computer Technology at the University  of Cambridge and Head of the Computer Laboratory. His research interests include networking, pervasive and sentient computing, and using computers for assuring the sustainability of the planet. He is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.

Andy Hopper has pursued academic and industrial careers in parallel. In the academic career he has worked in the Computer Laboratory and the Department of Engineering at Cambridge.  In the industrial career he has worked in senior roles for multinational companies and also co-founded a dozen spin-outs and start-ups, two of which floated on stock markets. He is currently chairman of RealVNC, Ubisense and Adventiq.

Professor Hopper received the BSc degree from the University of Wales Swansea (1974) and the PhD degree from the University of Cambridge (1978). He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1996) and of the Royal Society (2006). He was made a CBE for services to the computer industry (2007).

Prof Michael Kelly

Professor Michael Kelly has been the Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge since 2002 and is a Professorial Fellow at Trinity Hall.

He received his MSc from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and completed a PhD in solid state theory at Cambridge in 1974. He later worked at GEC Hirst Research Centre where he developed two new families of microwave devices that are still in production with E2V Technologies at Lincoln.

Prof Kelly was executive director of the Cambridge-MIT Institute, 2002-5. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Prof John Mann

John Mann received his BSc and PhD from University College London, and after four years of postdoctoral research (Syntex, Palo Alto; Harvard; Oxford) was appointed lecturer in Organic Chemistry at Reading University in 1974. He was promoted to Reader in 1988 and Professor in 1990 and obtained a DSc (London) in the same year. He moved to QUB in 1999 as the McClay Chair in Biological Chemistry and took on the role of PVC for RandD in January 2005.

His main research interests are in the synthesis of natural products and other biologically important compounds and the design and synthesis of anti-cancer and anti-viral agents.

Mr Paul McCambridge

Vice president of Xilinx EMEA, Paul McCambridge has responsibility for the company’s Dublin facility, including operations, customer services, software verification, human resources, IT and finance.  Prior to joining Xilinx, he served as a product line manager for Harris Semiconductor in New Jersey, before which he spent 12 years with General Electric Semiconductor Division in a variety of engineering, R&D, marketing and operations positions.

Mr McCambridge holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics from Queen’s University in Belfast and a master’s degree from University College in Dublin.

Prof Daniel V McCaughan OBE FREng FIAE

Prof McCaughan graduated from Queen’s  (PhD, Physics 1968, DSc Engineering 1992) and in 1968 moved to Bell Laboratories, working in semiconductors and plasma processing. From 1974, at RSRE Malvern, he led silicon and signal processing device development. He moved to GEC in 1981, running VLSI, microwave and SAW R&D, before becoming technical director of GEC Electronic Devices and EEV.

On returning to Belfast in 1988 he built and directed NITEC, STC/Nortel Telecomms Engineering Centre, then became chief scientist, BNR/Nortel Technology. He was president/COO of CDT (displays) in 2000, then CTO of Trireme Systems (2002). He is chief technology adviser to Kernel Capital partners and sits on the Board of the DHSSPS.  He runs a broad-based  technical and management business consultancy.

Mr Denis Murphy

Denis Murphy has over 20 years of sales and management experience in the ICT industry. He is chairman and CEO at Anaeko, a company he co-founded in 2004. Prior to Anaeko he co-founded Mobile Cohesion in 2002, after two years at Openwave, where he was country manager for Ireland. He sold Mobile Cohesion in 2008. Previously, he was managing director and co-founder of Apion which developed a market leading WAP gateway product for mobile operators. Apion was acquired by Phone.com (now Openwave) in 1999 for $250m.

Mr Murphy holds a degree in Business Studies from University College Galway and an MBA from the Michael Smurfit Business School at University City Dublin. He holds a range of technology investments primarily in the mobile space and is Chairman of the SDP Alliance. He is also a visiting Professor at the University of Ulster.

Prof Stephen James Nightingale

Prof Nightingale is chief consultant in electronic design at ERA Technology Ltd, Leatherhead, UK.  His prime engineering interests are in the research, development and application of technology associated with RF and microwave devices, components and systems. 

He is currently chief engineer on a major international programme to develop and supply the US coastguard with RF interference cancellation systems.  He is also acting as a consultant to a UK MoD/US DoD naval programme for an RF-on-fibre communication system.

Prof Nightingale has been a director of the European Microwave Association (EuMA), chairman of the IEE Electronics and Communications Division and is currently a visiting Professor at Surrey University.

Prof Tobias Noll

Prof Noll received his MS degree from Technical University of Munich in 1982 and a PhD from Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany in 1989. In 1992, he joined the Electrical Engineering Faculty of RWTH Aachen University as chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Systems.

Prof Noll has thirty years of experience in VLSI architectures, circuits, and design methodologies with a focus on high-performance low-power DSP applications and deep-submicron issues.

He is a former member of the ISSCC’s US-Program Subcommittee on Signal Processing and has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems.

Mr Michael O'Sullivan

Michael O'Sullivan graduated from UCC with a BComm degree then trained with Coopers & Lybrand in Cork where he qualified as a Chartered Accountant.

He worked as an auditor and management consultant with Coopers & Lybrand in London for a number of years before taking up a post as financial controller of KeyMed (Medical and Industrial Equipment) Limited, a UK subsidiary of the Olympus Corporation.

In 1985, Mr O’Sullivan joined the National Microelectronics Research Centre (NMRC) as administration manager and was appointed assistant director in 1989. He was appointed vice-president for Planning, Communications & Development at UCC in March 1999.

Mr Jeff Patmore

Mr Patmore’s main fields of interest include human-computer interaction, software agents, user modelling and the semantic web.

A Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, he has worked in a variety of positions during his career. These have included: director of Young Engineers for Britain (2002-2004); head of Internet & multimedia research & development, BT Exact (1999-2003); head of on-line Education, Training and Health Services, BT Exact (1998-1999) and chief technology officer for BT Cable Television Services (1996-1998).

He is currently a Board Member of STEMNET for the East of England (2006-2008);  Member of The International Institute of Management Development (1998-2008) and The Cambridge University Crucible Network (2001-2008). Past memberships include The Science Education Forum (2002-2005) and CBI, Inter-Company Academic Relations Group (2002-2005).

Prof Jan M Rabaey

Jan M Rabaey’s main research interests include the conception and implementation of next-generation integrated wireless systems.  He received his EE and PhD degrees in applied sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium before working as a research manager at IMEC, Belgium.

He subsequently joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (ECCS) department of the University of California, Berkeley where he now holds the Donald O Pederson Distinguished Professorship.

Prof Rabey is currently the scientific co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) and director of the GigaScale Systems Research Center (GSRC). An IEEE Fellow, he serves on the advisory board of a wide range of companies.

Dr Stephen Seawright

Dr Seawright was educated at Queen’s University, Belfast where he obtained a BEng degree in 1986 and a PhD in Microwave Engineering in 1991.

After a brief spell in British Telecom Research Laboratories, he joined TDK Corporation of Japan. From 1992 to 1995 he worked as a research scientist in Tokyo and later as a field application engineer in Germany. He was appointed RF business development manager in 1996 when he assumed responsibility for TDK’s European R&D projects. 

In 1999, TDK established an RF centre of excellence in Dublin and later opened a branch office within ECIT.  Dr Seawright has been managing director of the Irish operation from its inception. 

Prof Earl E Swartzlander Jr

Prof Swartzlander is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. 

His research interests include application specific processor design including high-speed computer arithmetic, systolic signal processor architecture, VLSI technology, and rapid prototyping. 

Prior to joining the University of Texas in 1990, he held a variety of positions at TRW. A fellow of the IEEE, his awards include the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award from the University of Colorado, the Outstanding Electrical Engineer and Distinguished Engineering Alumnus awards from Purdue University and the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core Award.

Dr Dolores Byrne

Details to follow shortly