Professor Linda Doyle – Director
Linda Doyle is the Director of CONNECT/CTVR and Professor of Engineering and The Arts in Trinity College, University of Dublin. Her expertise is in the fields of wireless communications, cognitive radio, reconfigurable networks, spectrum management and creative arts practices. She has raised over 70 million in research funding in the past decade and has published widely in her field. Prof. Doyle has a reputation as an advocate for change in spectrum management practices and has played a role in spectrum policy at the national and international level. Currently she is a member of the National Broadband Steering Committee in Ireland, and is a member of the Ofcom Spectrum Advisory Board in the UK. Prof. Doyle is on the advisory board of Wireless@KTH in Sweden. She is a Fellow of TrinityCollege Dublin. She is on the Board of the Festival of Curiosity A STEM outreach activity for children based on a city-centre yearly science festival. She is a judge in the BT Young Scientist, Ireland’s premier science competition for school children. She is on the Boards of the Douglas Hyde Gallery and Pallas Studios. Prof. Doyle is a Director of Xcelerit and SRS, two CTVR/CONNECT spin-outs.
Dr. Jeff Punch – Deputy Director
Jeff Punch is currently Director of the Micro-Mechanical Engineering Group at the Stokes Institute, University of Limerick (UL), collaborating with the Institute’s partners and clients on a range of research programmes. He has wide-ranging research interests in the analysis of micro-scale mechanical engineering phenomena within the application arenas of electronic and micro-electromechanical systems – with particular emphasis on thermal management and reliability physics. He has a strong track-record in governmental and industrial research programmes, and is currently supervising five doctoral students and mentoring three postdoctoral researchers.
Dr Frank Peters – Co PI
Frank H. Peters is a member of the Tyndall National Institute and a Lecturer in the Physics Department at the University College Cork, Cork, Ireland. Frank is interested in the development and integration of photonics devices. He has a strong academic and industrial background. After completing a Ph.D. at McMaster University, Canada in 1991, he worked as a Research Engineer in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara working on Vertical Cavity Lasers and Modulators. From 1993 until 2001 he worked as a research scientist at Optical Concepts, W. L. Gore and Associates and Agilent Technologies developing and integrating photonic devices into datacom and telecom applications. From 2001-2005 Frank worked at Infinera in Sunnyvale California, U.S.A. in the development of high speed photonic integrated circuits.
Dr Ken Brown – Co PI
Ken Brown is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork, and a member of the Cork Constraint Computation Centre. His research is focused on intelligent decision support and optimisation, applied to resource allocation, scheduling, supply chains, networks and design and manufacturing, with a particular interest in uncertain, distributed and competitive domains. He has published over 40 refereed papers, and has collaborated extensively with industry, including LandRover, Digital/Compaq and Microsoft Research.
He has a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics from the University of Glasgow, an MSc in Logic and Computation from the University of Manchester, and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence in Engineering from the University of Bristol. He has worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bristol and at Carnegie Mellon University. He was appointed as Lecturer in Computer Science at University of Aberdeen in 1995, and joined UCC in 2003.
Dr. Ronan Farrell – Co PI
Ronan Farrell is head of the Department of Electronic Engineering at NUI Maynooth and Director of the Callan Institute where he has built up a Mixed Signal/RF systems research group, concentrating on Design and Test issues in the mixed signal and RF space. He received his BE (Electronic Engineering) degree from University College Dublin in 1993 following which, he was employed as a control systems engineer by Zeneca Pharmaceuticals in England and the U.S.A. In 1995, Ronan Farrell returned to University College Dublin to work on a Ph.D. in the field of sigma-delta modulators for data converters in collaboration with Analog Devices, graduating in 1998. On graduation, Ronan joined Parthus Technologies in Dublin, a then recently founded integrated-circuit design company specialising in providing intellectual property in the mixed signal and wireless communications space. In August 2000 joined NUI Maynooth in their newly founded Electronic Engineering Department .
Prof. Luiz DaSilva – Co PI
Luiz DaSilva currently holds the Stokes Professorship in Telecommunications in the department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at Trinity College Dublin. He has also been a faculty member in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech since 1998. Prof. DaSilva’s research focuses on distributed and adaptive resource management in wireless networks, and in particular cognitive radio networks and the application of game theory to wireless networks. He is currently a principal investigator on research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, and the European Commission under Framework Programme 7. Recent research sponsors also include DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, Intel, and Microsoft Research.
Prof. David Payne – Co PI
Dave Payne joined CTVR in Trinity College Dublin in February 2010. Before this he was a principal consultant to BT group on optical networks where responsible for strategic guidance and direction on optical network architectures to BT Group CTO and BT Openreach strategy. In the past number of years he has been the Senor Industrial Advisor at the Institute of Advanced Telecommunications at Swansea University where he provided network architecture expertise in order to establish collaborative links with BT Research.
Dr. Frank Smyth – Executive Director
Frank is an experienced researcher and entrepreneur who has been involved with CTVR since 2005. His PhD was undertaken through CTVR-I and included a co-funded internship with core partner Alcatel-Lucent in Bell Labs, New Jersey. Subsequently, Frank carried out post-doctoral research in CTVR@DCU where he developed several patents and began to focus on the commercialisation of his research. In 2011, he co-founded CTVR spin-out company Pilot Photonics which continues to design and develop optical comb sources for the telecoms market. With knowledge of the university-based research sector and experience of the commercial challenges of a start-up Frank brings insight, perspective and leadership to CTVR.
Mark Cooney – Commercialisation and Industry Liaison Manager
Mark has over 20 years experience in the hi-tech and business sectors. He has served in a number of senior technical and managerial roles with Philips Semiconductors, Intel, and IBEC. He promotes commercial development by identifying opportunities within the research programme, and facilitates their progression towards commercially viable enterprises. Mark is also responsible for managing and promoting the relationships with our commercial partners and for seeking out and enabling new opportunities.
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