I am a senior lecturer in TU Dublin with a focus on teaching signal processing, machine learning and programming in addition to the fundamentals of electronics and circuit theory.
In 2010 I was awarded a teaching fellowship which provided me with an opportunity to develop online resources and my youtube channel has now been accessed over 3.7 million times with 18,000 subscribers. My online virtual oscilloscope, which I developed during the 2020 COVID pandemic, has also been widely accessed (~500 impressions per day) and is currently ranked at the top of Google's search engine. In 2023 I released a dataset of over 5,000 online quiz questions for electrical and electronic engineering students, covering a range of topics including fundamental circuit analysis, mathematics, programming, and electrical equipment use.
I was delighted to be awarded a Teaching Hero Award from the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in 2021. This award is particularly nice to receive as it comes through student nominations during the COVID pandemic. This was a challenging time to be a student and I was extremely pleased to have been able to help my students during difficult circumstances.
Through my research I have secured over €2.5 million in funding and have published over 40 academic papers. I have also supervised 4 PhD students to completion. While I was a postgraduate researcher I formed the Audio Research Group with two of my postgraduate colleagues. This group was successful in securing significant funding and expanded to 13 researchers at its height. In 2010 the group diverged to form a company which developed Riffsation, a software based teaching aid for guitarists, and was subsequently acquired by Fender Musical Instrument Corporation to lead its digital audio R&D activities.
My research activities have led to invitations to review articles for the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,the EURASIP Journal, Journal of Applied Sciences, European Society for Engineering Education: SEFI, Journal of Online Teaching and Learning, and the Irish Signals & Systems Conference. I have also been on the organising committee for Spatial Cognition (2024), the Irish Machine Vision and Image Processing Conference (2019) Irish Signals and Systems Conference (2006).
I am advocate of project based learning within the University and have heavily promoted the adoption of PBL since I joined in 2005. This approach encourages students to develop effective communication, leadership and group interaction skills in addition to providing students with the technical know-how required to work effectively in industry. As part of this approach I initiated a RoboSumo competition in which students build small robots which attempt to push each the opposing robot off a circular arena. This has since become an integral part of our first year engineering experience across all our engineering programmes.