Victoria Research Laboratory Director
Victoria Laboratory, Melbourne

Professor Rob Evans was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1947.  After completing a BE degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Melbourne in 1969, he worked as a radar systems engineering officer with the Royal Australian Airforce.  He completed a PhD in 1975 at the University of Newcastle followed by postdoctoral studies at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT, USA and the Control and Management Department, Cambridge University, UK.

In 1977 he took up an academic position at the University of Newcastle, where he was Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1986 - 1991, and Co-Director of the Centre on Industrial Control Systems between 1988 - 1991.

In 1992 he moved to the University of Melbourne, where he was Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering until 1996. He was Research Leader for the Cooperative Centre for Sensor Signal and Information Processing until 2000 and Director of the Centre for Networked Decision Systems until 2004.  He is currently Director of the Victoria Research Laboratory of National ICT Australia.

He has worked extensively with industry in Australia and overseas over the past 30 years. He has been closely involved with the development of a number of telecommunications and target tracking systems and products for industry. Projects include the development of variable speed AC drives, development of star and satellite servo tracking systems for large antennae now installed in many countries, large fault-tolerant SCADA systems, etc. He has extensive experience in the design and implementation of both hardware and software for industrial real-time embedded microprocessor systems. He was Director of Technology for TUNRA Industrial Electronics from 1983-1992.

Professor Evans has served on many national and international committees.  He has served on a number of Government and Academy committees. He was a founding member of the Asian Control Conference Steering Committee, co-chair of the international program committee for the 1993 IFAC World Conference, General Chair of the 2003 International Data Fusion Conference, General Chair of the 2004 Asian Control Conference, and has been a member of the program committees of around 50 international conferences.  He was chair of the ARC Engineering 2 panel from1994-1996. He is currently a member of the Council of the International Federation for Automatic Control and a Director of HEARCRC.

His research has ranged across many areas including theory and applications in industrial control, radar systems, signal processing and telecommunications. He has published more than 450 research papers and supervised more than 50 PhD students in these areas. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA), a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (FTSE), a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, USA (FIEEE) and Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia (FIEAust).