Prof Gerard Parr PhD, MBE

Gerard is a Full Professor in  Telecommunications Engineering and has been  Head of School of Computing Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) from 2016-2023 which involved a range of senior management roles and responsibilities covering Teaching, Research, Innovation and  Outreach.  He holds a PhD in Self-Stabilising Protocols from Ulster University, aspects of which were completed with University College London (UCL) and one of the founding Fathers of the Internet (Professor Jon Postel) as a Visiting Research Scientist at the DARPA/University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute in Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles.  Within his academic career, areas of research include Wireless Sensor Clouds, UAV for Disaster Response Communications, ICT for the Rural Economy, Converged Network Management & Control Protocols  for Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks, delay-sensitive QoSLAs, energy-aware autonomic networking and IoT-edge computing. He has attracted several £millions of external research and commercial funding and has advised governments on the allocation of funding to large-scale projects valued in total at approximately £3 billion. He has extensive experience of working with developing economies, in particular, India, where he was the UK Academic co-ordinator for the major EPSRC-DST India-UK Advanced Technology Centre in Next Generation Networks Systems and Services which was the largest collaboration of its kind between UK and India in the ICT sector attracting total investment of over £20 million and also helped establish a Virtual Graduate Research School for 67 PhD students under the UKIERI Programme. Gerard was awarded an MBE in Queens New Year Honours for 2018 for contributions to Telecommunications Infrastructure in Northern Ireland. Most recently in December 2022 he was successful as a Co-PI on a bid to UKRI-ESRC concerning Digital Technology in Teacher Agency. The £5.3 million fund will support a total of nine projects. He is also a Member of the UKRI-EPSRC Digital Security & Resilience Advisory Group.