Professor Richard Neilson made a presentation to Dr Stewart Chalmers with thanks given to Stewart for his work on various projects.

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Stewart has worked as an Engineer for the NDC (formerly Oceanlab Business Unit) since 1^st September 2008, mostly based at Newburgh.   In recent years Stewart has worked 50% in Old Aberdeen within SBS as part of Prof. Paul Hallett’s research group as XRay CT Manager.

Stewart was also part of the Oceanlab team for the DELOS project that provided environmental monitoring for BP offshore Angola where his experience in underwater acoustics was of particular value.

Following graduation with a BSc (Eng.) Hons in Electronic Engineering Stewart began his career as an Electronics Design Engineer for an American multi-national corporation and whilst there studied for an MSc in Digital Techniques.  This was followed by a year designing electronic systems for NMRA scanners.  He then spent 16 years as a Lecturer at Robert Gordon University School of Electronic Engineering specialising in digital systems design and signal processing.  Whilst there Stewart became a Chartered Engineer and undertook research leading to a PhD with a thesis entitled ‘Study of Design Methodologies for Fault Tolerant State Machine Controllers’.  Following this he worked for a start-up, designing VLSI Neural Network chips, then for several years designing subsea electronic systems before joining the University of Aberdeen.

Although not directly employed in a research position he had research interests in several areas including fault tolerant and reliable systems design, developing this into a practical interest in the software engineering of embedded systems. Over the years he implemented many systems and gradually devised a design methodology based on finite state machines, which addressed the design at a high level of abstraction and allowed verification of the control  part of the algorithm prior to coding.

Stewart also had an interest in interconnected sensors via standards such as IEEE1451 and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative, which at an early stage of development required a great deal of practical implementation and testing in order to become truly useful standards for the sharing of data via the ethernet.  Stewart addressed this possibility with regard to all sensor systems which were developed onsite.

Notes for Editors