Career History

May2012  - present

October 2006 – May 2012

Systems Engineering & Assessment Limited

SEA House, Building 660,

Bristol Business Park,

Coldharbour Lane, Bristol. BS16 1EJ.

United Kingdom

April 2001-October 2006

European Space Agency,

GNSS Project Office,

Batiment Ariane,

Centre Spatiale de Toulouse,

31401Toulouse Cedex 4,

France.

September 1999 – April 2001

European Commission

DG Joint Research Centre,

I-21020 Ispra (VA),

Italy

September 1997- Sept1999

May 1992 – September 1997

Matra Marconi Space UK Ltd.

P.O. Box 16, Filton, Bristol.

United Kingdom

January 1990 – May 1992

May 1988 – January 1990

November 1987 – May 1988

Wessex Water Authority,

Quay House, Bath, United Kingdom

Education and training

August 1983  – May 1987

University College of Wales,

Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth,

Dyfed United Kingdom

October 1980  – June 1983 

University College, Cardiff

Park Place, Cardiff, United Kingdom

October  1978- July1980 

Farnham College, Morley Road, Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom

September  1973- July1978 

Weydon County Comprehensive

Farnham, Surrey,United Kingdom

·      Experienced and adaptable systems engineer and manager responsible for integrating complex hardware and software systems;

·      Co-ordination of Projects involving teams of Industrial and Institutional partners;

·      Engaged, team player focused on delivery of the best technical result within the budgets and timescales allocated;

·      Used to working on multi-national projects, living outside the United Kingdom with some knowledge of Swedish, French and –limited- Italian.

·      Currently a Capability Manager overseeing 36 staff supporting annual project turnover of 12M€/annum, with associated bid qualification & proposal delivery;

·      Participated in preparing Statements of Work, evaluation of the resulting proposals and oversight of large European projects as part of an Institutional customer team;

·      Looking for a new challenge to build upon technical & business management skills, preferably where these can be applied to meaningful applications.

Space Division Capability Development Manager

Building from the Ground systems role, described below, managing a team of 36 engineers in a matrix structure, responsible for staff development, productivity & recruitment for flight electronics projects. Also responsible for peer review of design & process  improvement.

Ground Systems Programme Manager, Aerospace Division,
Built a team that has grown to 12 staff over 4 years, delivering ground test equipment to support flight electronics development with delegated budget, resourcing and bidding responsibility, reporting to the Divisional Director for:

·         Bidding opportunity qualification, assembly of teams, cost estimation & clearance and the co-ordination of proposals for complex bids with values up to 1.5M€, achieving a 40-50% success rate, based upon a “Shipley” approach;

·         Supporting project managers in the delivery of 1.8M€/annum turnover and reporting to senior management with respect to project status, cash flow and risk management using processes adapted from “Prince2”;

·         Managing the people under my responsibility, including recruitment, career development, evaluating performance against meaningful targets & salary review;

·         Project management, including Co-ordinator of I²GPS, an EU-FP7 Project with seven partners in five countries developing equipment and conducting field trials on the integrated use of GPS and SAR interferometry for landslide detection.

AIV Systems Engineer

Oversaw the system level integration, verification and initiation of the operational qualification of EGNOSthe European Space-based augmentation system for GPS in preparation for certification.  Reporting to the System Manager key activities were:

·         Development of a traceable qualification file (TRAC) to provide clear mapping between verification activities and requirements, following my identification of deficiencies in the proposed industrial approach at Critical Design Review;

·         On site customer representative during system factory integration and testing, co-ordinating feedback from other members of the ESA project team, concerning the planning, execution and acceptability of the overall test programme;

·         Metric based evaluation of verification and integration progress, based upon numbers of tests exercised, mapping of non-conformances (and regression testing) versus sub-system releases and reflecting outcomes in the TRAC;

·         Development of a System Verification and Qualification Policy, governing testing and introduction of upgrades into the system, making operational elementsavailable for testing whilst maintaining service continuity.

Temporary Agent/ Auxiliary Agent, Space Applications Institute.

Lead a team providing technical support to the Transport Directorate General during the definition phase of the Galileo navigation system, overseeing the industrial contract, liaison with the ESA, preparation of the initial High Level Definition Document and supporting negotiations concerning co-operative development with Russia.

The High Level Definition Document summarised the project mission at a synthetic level and was used to support the proposed Directive at Council and was maintained as a reference document for subsequent Galileo development. Delivered in only two weeks, it required understanding of the system envisaged and the customer needs to extract the relevant information from a large underlying document.

Visiting Scientist, Centre for Earth Observation.

Worked as part of the Prime/ customer team to perform the technical management of the integration and system acceptance of INFEO, a web-based interoperable catalogue server, delivering dynamic html from a miSQL database.This included liaison with all contractors, oversight of operational testing and subsequent development of a simplified user interface, using a prototype strategy with pilot users.

Principle Systems Engineer.

Conducted reliability, failure modes and safety analysis for Hubble Space telescope Solar Array (STSA) including participation to NASA Safety reviews. This lead on to the preparation of Contingency Operations Procedures and participation in mission operations during four Servicing Missions. Other work involved liaison between a Prime systems team co-located in Versailles to ensure a consistent approach with the project team back in Bristol and a number of feasibility studies for distributed data processing systems, space craft missions and instrument design.

Image Processing Analyst, NRSC Ltd.

Worked as part of a small business unit for the end to end production of EO data images to meet customer needs. This included estimating and bidding, processing, delivering and even billing customers for the resulting maps and data products. Other work included requirements capture for a data archive and writing the User Manual for a PC based satellite data receiving system.

Systems Engineer

Followed the solar array blanket manufacture for the STSA quickly developing an understanding for photovoltaic cells and their thermal and mechanical behaviour. This included design supervision of electrical performance testing and led on to revising the System Description Manual.

Computer programmer.

Developed information management and telemetry monitoring software for internal company use.

Ph.D “An Alternative Physical basis for the Interpretation Of Complex Resistivity Data for Use in Mineral Exploration”

Developed models for analysing complex resistivity data based upon the assumption that permittivity and permeability could not be neglected.

BSc (Hons):     Geophysics (II.1)

Foundations:     Mathematics, Physics, Geology and Mineral Exploitation

Detailed study:  Geophysical exploration (gravity, magnetometry, seismology etc.)

       “A” Level:   Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry.

       “O” Level:   Geology

       “O” Level:   Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography

                        English Language, French.