David Davidson

Professor David Davidson currently serves as the discipline lead for Electrical and Computer Engineering at Curtin University, bringing nearly four decades of expertise in computational electromagnetics and radio astronomy engineering. His remarkable career began at the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in 1984 before joining Stellenbosch University in 1988, where he pioneered developments in computational electromagnetic tools for RF and microwave engineering. His work contributed significantly to the commercial software package FEKO and led to his appointment as SKA Research Chair at Stellenbosch in 2011. After serving as Distinguished Professor at Stellenbosch University, he relocated to Australia in 2018, where he served as Director of Engineering at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research until 2022. His scholarly contributions include a widely-cited book on computational electromagnetics in its second edition, co-authorship of a text on phased arrays for radio astronomy, several book chapters, approximately 80 peer-reviewed journal papers, and over 160 conference papers. His expertise earned him the prestigious IEEE Fellowship in 2012 "for contributions to computational electromagnetics," and he continues to advance the field through his leadership in both academic and research domains at Curtin University, where he focuses on astronomical instrumentation and signal processing.