Laboratory Director
Neville Roach Laboratory (Kensington), Sydney

Dr Terry Percival was awarded a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and a PhD from the University of Sydney, in 1977 and 1985 respectively and is a Graduate member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.  The first ten years of his research career was spent in the design and construction of microwave-receiving systems for radio telescopes, including the Fleurs Telescope, the Australia Telescope, and the Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico. He also worked at the National Measurement Laboratory performing research into high Tc superconductors, satellite navigation, and time and frequency standards.

In 1987, he joined OTC Australia, where he led research and development groups working on the development of submarine optical fibre communications systems and thin-route satellite communications systems including the development of a new international standard called Digital DAMANet.

He joined CSIRO in 1991 and led a research team working on broadband wireless communications systems and high speed wireless Local Area Networks (LANs). The resulting patented technology forms an integral part of the IEEE 802.11a & g wireless LAN standards.  This technology was successfully commercialised via a start-up company called Radiata Communications, which was later acquired by Cisco Systems. During this time he was also a visiting professorial fellow at Macquarie University.

In 1996, Dr Percival established new mobile communications and telecommunications networking research groups at CSIRO. Based upon this research, he performed numerous collaborative research projects with telecommunications carriers, end users, and equipment vendors.

In 2000, he created and was Director of the Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CeNTIE), which was successful in bidding for $14 million funding under the Advanced Networks Program to build the next generation research network in Australia with a roll-out cost of $44 million. Projects under CeNTIE included the rollout of the trans-continental Gigabit Foundation Network, development of networked virtual reality surgical training systems, the deployment of a Film Post Production Research Network, programmable networking technology, and the creation and deployment of a Virtual Critical Care Unit (ViCCU®)  for remote emergency care in collaboration with Wentworth Area Health Service.

In June 2004 he joined National ICT Australia as the Director of the Sydney Research Laboratory at Kensington. He built up the laboratory and mentored the spinout of two of NICTA’s successful spinouts; OK Labs and Audinate. More recently he has been working with two fledgling spinouts from his laboratory; mContext and Goanna.

Since leaving CSIRO he has continued to be involved as a key witness in the litigation against 14 companies for infringement of the aforementioned wireless LAN patent. This concluded with his appearance in court in Texas in April 2009 and the subsequent settlements resulting in royalties estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. CSIRO is using this money to reinvigorate the CSIRO Science and Industry Endowment Fund.

He has been a director of several start-ups and received a number of awards and memberships of government and scientific advisory panels including:

• 2009  Member NSW Government Broadband Implementation Taskforce
• 2008  Technical review committees for the Australia Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASAKP).
• 2008  Member NSW Government Broadband Advisory Panel
• 2007  Member Minister Coonan’s Broadband Blueprint Industry Reference Group
• 2007  Health Informatics Society of Australia’s Don Walker Award for Improving Access to Healthcare in Rural and Remote Communities
• 2004  Australia Information Industry Association’s iAward for the ViCCU®
• 2002  Nortel Networks special achievement award for 10 G Metro Ethernet pilot
• 2000  CSIRO 2000 Medal for Research Leadership