Australia’s leading research and development experts

The Advisory Board brings together some of Australia’s leading research and development experts, and is responsible for providing direction and advice, approving projects recommended for Defence Innovation Partnership funding and identifying opportunities for growth and further development.

The Advisory Board comprises seven members representing each of the five member parties plus two independent industry members.

As the Continuous Naval Shipbuilding (CNS) Strategy Director at ASC Shipbuilding, Sharon is responsible for the CNS and (AIC) Strategy and Plans for the Hunter Class Frigate Program. Her role includes responsibility for the Innovation program, the governance and measurement framework for CNS and AIC and the Exports and Future Business strategy and growth for ASC Shipbuilding.

In the more than 29 years she has worked at BAE Systems, Sharon has held many positions including leadership roles in project management, procurement, estimating and as the General Manager of the BAE Systems Global Supply Chain program and Head of Industrial Strategy.

Sharon is a member of the Flinders University Advisory Council and a member of the Defence Innovation Partnership board.

Sharon understands the breadth and depth of Australian industry capability and the power of collaboration with Defence across academia, research, primes, and small and medium-sized enterprises. She brings an enthusiastic and holistic approach to Defence and industry collaborations that will support the needs of Defence now and into the future.

Prof. Bruce Northcote is Chief Security Officer at the University of Adelaide. He is also CEO of TelAri Analytics – a commercial spin out from research in his previous role.

From 1994 until 1996 he worked at Bellcore (NJ, USA) as their lead consultant in Signalling System Number 7 and Advanced Intelligent Network congestion control research and Personal Communications Services performance analysis. In 1996 he joined Ascom Nexion to develop for them a coordinated performance benchmark test plan for multi-service switching platforms. After acquisition and promotion he became a Consulting Engineer in Fujitsu Nexion, working on broadband technology assessment, product definition and standardization activities for the Fujitsu broadband product range, actively participating in various standards forums (IETF, ATMF, ANSI T1S1 & ITU-T SG13).

Between returning to Australia in December 1999 and his current employment, he was a consultant for BSN Consulting Pty Ltd and Telic Australia Pty Ltd, working on projects for customers ranging from Vodafone Australia, Telstra, Telcordia (USA), Viridien (USA), to the Victorian Department of Justice. He has published over 20 refereed journal and conference papers, written numerous technical contributions for a variety of international standards bodies, is a senior member of IEEE and was an accredited ATM Forum Ambassador for several years.

Alistair Rendell completed a Bachelor of Science degree at Durham University in 1983 majoring in chemistry and was subsequently awarded an international Commonwealth Scholarship to study theoretical chemistry in Australia at the University of Sydney. Graduating with a PhD in 1988 he then held postdoctoral positions at the University of Lund in Sweden and at the NASA Ames Research Centre in the USA, developing computational chemistry software for the latest high-end vector supercomputers. From 1991-94 he worked in the UK at what is now the Science and Technology Facilities Council Daresbury Laboratory pioneering some of the first quantum chemistry algorithms for an emerging range of distributed memory parallel computers. He returned to Australia in 1995 taking up a position in the Supercomputer Facility of the Australian National University (ANU) where he led a major collaborative project with Fujitsu Japan. In 2001 he moved to an academic appointment in computer science to pursue research and teaching in the general area of high-performance computing, going on to become Director of the ANU Research School of Computer Science from 2013-2018. During his time as Director the School more than doubled in size and forged a major partnership with the Australian Signals Directorate. In 2019 he moved to Flinders University as Vice President and Executive Dean for the College of Science and Engineering.

Professor Rendell has more than 100 refereed publications in a range of areas including chemistry, biology, and computer science, and has contributed to a variety of widely used computational science programs. He continues to maintain a research interest in parallel computing particularly around the use of novel computer architectures and is currently engaged in an exascale software development project with collaborators in the USA.

Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington is the strategic and operational leader across research activities at the University of South Australia. Her role is to design and deliver approaches that help staff and research students alike to engage with industry, government and community to deliver novel and transformational solutions to problems, and to change the ways that we think about the world.

A graduate of the Universities of Tasmania and Oxford, Marnie has a strong global profile as a philosopher and as an historian who seeks to explain why histories and historical thinking play an important role in making a good, fair and just world. The impact of her work has been broad: her writing has been translated into five languages, over 26,000 copies of her books have been sold, and her theories are taught across the world. She has led or been an investigator on a total of $18 million in grants. Her most recent book is History as Wonder (2018), and her current research investigates the connections between the scales of history and ethics, and the logic at play in machine-made histories. She serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Global History, which is published by Cambridge University Press.

Prior to taking up the role, she was Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic and Professor of History at the Australian National University (2012–19), where her duties ranged from admissions, academic standards and chairing the revenue committee for edX, through to academic school reviews and promotions. Her achievements included the development of a more diverse researcher workforce through systemic changes to promotion and recruitment; the $260 million Kambri campus redevelopment; and the $106 million Tuckwell gift.

In addition to these contributions, she was the first woman to be National Secretary for the Rhodes Scholarships Australia and she currently serves on the Rhodes Trust Scholarships Committee, which looks after over 100 scholarships worldwide. She is also a member of the National Selection Panel for the Westpac Scholars Trust.