Work Package 3 (L_WP3) Leader

Principal Investigator (Cardiff University)

John McWhirter gained a First Class Honours degree in Mathematics (1970) and a PhD in Theoretical Physics (1973) from the Queen’s University of Belfast. In 1973 he joined the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern (later to become the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE), and now part of QinetiQ Ltd). He left QinetiQ in 2007 to take up a post as Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Engineering at Cardiff University.

John McWhirter has been conducting research on adaptive sensor array signal processing since 1980. In the process he built up the RSRE Signal Processing Group which carried out research on all aspects of digital signal processing for defence, with particular emphasis on adaptive filtering and beamforming. This group soon became renowned as a centre of excellence worldwide and, in recognition of this, he received the EURASIP Group Technical Achievement Award in 2003. He has published more than 170 research papers and holds numerous patents. In 1994 he was awarded the J J Thomson Medal by the Institution of Electrical Engineers for his personal research into systolic array processors. He is currently pursuing another programme of highly original research into broadband sensor arrays, convolutive blind signal separation, and polynomial matrix decomposition techniques.

John McWhirter was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1996 and the Royal Society in 1999. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) and served as President of the IMA in 2002 and 2003.

Email: mcwhirterjg@cf.ac.uk