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Media Release

November 30 2007

Fresh leadership for telecommunications research in SA

Prof Alex Grant - Director UniSA's Institute for Telecommunications Research Professor Alex Grant, the youngest academic to have been appointed Professor at UniSA has just been appointed to the role of Director of UniSA’s Institute for Telecommunications Research at Mawson Lakes.

Professor Grant moved from his student days at UniSA - completing a Bachelor of Engineering in 1993 and then a PhD - to an academic career first as a Research Fellow at ITR in 1996.

In 1997 he spent a year as a Research Fellow in the Laboratory for Signal and Information Processing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich Switzerland, returning to UniSA to take up a position as Lecturer (Research).

Prof Grant’s research centres on developing coding for telecommunications networks that will improve the efficiency of these networks in a range of settings from remote defence and civilian applications to ICT- intense urban environments.

His outstanding performance saw him promoted to Senior Lecturer (Research) in 2001 and then to Research Professor of Information Theory in 2004 at the age of 32.

Prof Grant’s research career has been remarkable. He has won more than $3.9M in research funding including nine Australian Research Council grants and a prestigious Fellowship from the National ICT Australia. He was also co-founder of Cohda Wireless Pty Ltd, an Adelaide-based mobile broadband start up company.

In 2004 he was awarded a Young Tall Poppy Science Award from the Australian Institute of Political Science for outstanding achievements in science.

He has also built a number of significant collaborative research arrangements with national organisations such as Melbourne University, NICTA, CSIRO, the University of Sydney, Newcastle University, ANU, and DSTO and international organisations such as Bell Laboratories USA, the University of Southern California, Nortel Networks in the UK, the Vienna Telecommunications Research Centre in Austria and ENSEA in France.

About the Institute for Telecommunications Research

UniSA’s ITR is one of Australia's foremost research organisations specialising in technology for digital wireless communications, including both fixed and mobile satellite and terrestrial radio services. The Institute continues to develop its research base while applying its expertise to real-world project requirements. ITR offers opportunities for graduate engineers to complete postgraduate research degrees such as the Masters of Engineering or a PhD.

 

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