He completed a PhD in 1975 at the University of Newcastle followed by postdoctoral studies at the Laboratory for Information and decision Systems, MIT, USA and the Control and Management Department, Cambridge University, UK. In 1977 he took up an academic position at the University of Newcastle, where he was Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1986 - 1991, and Co-recipient of the ARC Special Research Centre on Industrial Control Systems between 1988 - 1991.
In 1992 he moved to the University of Melbourne, where he was Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering until 1996 and has several times served for short periods as Dean of Engineering. He was Research Leader for the Cooperative Centre for Sensor Signal and Information Processing until 2000 and Director of the DSTO Centre of Excellence in Networked Decision Systems until 2004. He is currently Director of the Victoria Research Laboratory and Managing Laboratory Director of National ICT Australia.
He has worked extensively with industry in Australia and overseas over the past 40 years.
He has been heavily involved with the development of a number of products for industry, including the development of variable speed AC drives, development of star and satellite servo tracking systems for large antennae now installed in many countries, large fault-tolerant SCADA systems, radar systems for defence, target tracking systems for defence and civil aviation etc. He has extensive experience in the design and implementation of both electronic hardware and computer software for real-time embedded systems in commercial products. He was Director of Technology for TUNRA Industrial Electronics from 1983-1992. He is currently a Director of Hearing CRC.
He has served on many national and international committees and numerous Government and Academy committees. He was a founding member of the Asian Control Conference Steering Committee, co-chair of the international program committee for the 1993 IFAC World Conference, General Chair of the 2003 International Data Fusion Conference, General Chair of the 2004 Asian Control Conference, and has been a member of the program committees of around 75 international conferences. He was chair of the ARC Engineering panel covering ICT from 1994-1996. He was a member of the Council of the International Federation for Automatic Control from 2002-2008.
His research has ranged across many areas including theory and applications in industrial control, radar systems, signal processing and telecommunications. He has published around 500 research papers, supervised more than 50 PhD students. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA), a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE), a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, USA (FIEEE) and Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia (FIEAust).
