Queensland Research Laboratory Director
Queensland Laboratory, Brisbane

Dr J. Chris Scott received his Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Queensland and a PhD from the City University in London .  His early work was as a research and development engineer with an Australian SME designing and building laser based systems where the first industrial 50W CO2 laser was manufactured in Australia.

His PhD research involved investigations of the optical pulse length dependence of damage in electro-optic materials of the type used in telecommunications.   He then commercialised the laser pulse chopping system developed during the PhD work through a UK SME - Electro-Optic Developments Ltd, 30 years on the system is still a current product of this company. 

On returning to Australia he joined the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research, where he developed laser radar systems (LIDAR) for atmospheric monitoring.

In the mid 80’s he joined BHP as a research scientist responsible for R&D in industrial process monitoring, including spectral imaging for remote and airborne minerals identification. He subsequently held  positions of Manager Research Process R&D, Manager Research Sensing Technologies, Manager Research Enabling Technologies and BHP Coordinating Scientist.  He was involved in two spin-off companies from BHP (BHP Aerospace and Electronics and BHP Instruments) and was part of the BHP management team which won an Australian Quality Award.

Dr Scott managed the initial stages of the successful minerals exploration tool based on US Navy technology for the measurement of Gravity gradients from an airborne platform (Project Falcon) and managed a team of signal and image processing experts on a major project aimed at visualisation of marine seismic data and the reduction of multiple reflections.

He represented BHP on several Commonwealth Government committees, including CSIRO advisory committees, and the US Industrial Research Institute (IRI).

In the late 90’s he was appointed General Manager, Technology Commercialisation at ANUTECH with The Australian National University. He was responsible the first IPO from ANU and established four new start-up companies for the University and was a foundation board member of EPICORP, a Canberra ICT incubator company.

In 2000 he joined Australian Photonics Pty Ltd as General Manager where he was responsible for managing stakeholder relationships and commercialisation from the Australian Photonics CRC.  He was involved in several start-up companies and their capital raisings and established and managed the $3.3 million Australian Defence Force project on optical signal processing for radar applications.

In January 2005 Dr Scott joined NICTA as Director of the Queensland Laboratory.