Professor Paddy Nixon

Professor Paddy Nixon received his PhD in Computer Science from Sheffield University in 1994 and he then joined Trinity College Dublin as a Lecturer where he developed and formed a successful research group and two research centres in Wireless Communications and in Virtual Organisations, bringing in almost euro 2M in research funds in a 5-year period. He was a visiting Associate Professor at California Institute of Technology for 2 successive years and was a contributor to the Irish Government e-commerce foresight exercise.

In 2000 he was appointed Professor of Computer Science in Strathclyde University, at the age 32 the youngest full computer science Professor in the UK. During this appointment he formed a new research group of 20 people, supported by euro 2.2M of funding. He also negotiated Strathclyde as host of the European Basic Research Network of Excellence in Ubiquitous Computing (euro 22M) which he coordinated.

In 2005 he returned to Ireland as Professor of Distributed Systems in UCD supported by a Science Foundation Ireland award of euro 2.4M. He established a research group that has already hosted two of the premier conferences in this area and which is funded by major industrial sponsors including HP, IBM, Microsoft, and INTEL. Alongside developing the group he has worked for IDA and EI in reviewing major investments, and in particular undertaking technical due diligence on two major euro 20M investments by IDA.

Paddy gave the Royal Society of Edinburgh prestigious Science and Society Public Lecture in 2003. His work has attracted 4 best paper awards. Professor Nixon is an IBM Faculty Fellow.