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Staff Profile

Emeritus Professor John Fitzgerald

Emeritus Professor

Background

John is a specialist in rigorous model-based techniques for engineering cyber-physical systems and systems-of-systems. He studied formal proof in Computing (PhD, Manchester Univ.), before joining Newcastle University, where he worked on design techniques for avionic systems with British Aerospace in the 1990s. He went on to study the potential for industrial application of formal modelling as a SERC Fellow and later as a Lecturer at Newcastle. He established the design and validation team at Transitive, a successful SME in the embedded processor market, before returning to the University in 2003 as Reader and then Professor.  

John was the School's academic lead on the design of the Urban Sciences Building - the first major university building at Newcastle Helix and the home for our research and teaching in computing since autumn 2017. Prior to that, he had served as the School's Director of Research (to 2015) and Deputy Head (to 2017) and at the same time as the move to the new building became Head of the School until 2022, when he moved to become Dean responsible for strategic projects across the Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering, a role encompassing large-scale and cross-faculty projects in Science, Engineering, Mathematics, and Computing. John has served in several other roles, including service as a member of the Faculty Promotions Committee and founding chair of the university's Technology Portfolio Board, responsible for the governance of IT projects. He retired from the University in April 20205, when he became an Emeritus Professor.


John remains active in research and engagement in a voluntary capacity. As one of the University's Senior Public Orators, he has the happy duty of presenting individuals to the University for recognition with honorary degrees and fellowships.


Research

In my research, I develop model-based methods and tools to help in the design of particularly challenging types of product, especially systems that require collaboration between engineering teams of differing backgrounds and disciplines.

My group here in Newcastle undertakes groundbreaking research into co-modelling and co-simulation in the design of trustworthy embedded and cyber-physical systems (in the DESTECS project and in the EPSRC platform grants on Trustworthy Ambient Systems). Our work in the Deploy project concentrated on achieving and demonstrating dependability through the deployment of formal methods in four industry sectors. In 2011-2014 I led the international COMPASS project, developing technology for engineering complex "Systems-of-Systems" that are built from pre-existing systems that might never have been designed with collaboration in mind. These strands of work come together in the work that I now led on multi-modelling methods in the INTO-CPS project. 

The impact of my group's research has been felt in the development of model-based engineering methods that have been successfully applied in areas as diverse as firmware design and options trading. We played a leading role in one of the first EU Horizon 2020 Innovation Actions, CPSELabs, and more recently HUBCAP, in which we provide funding and support to small and medium-sized businesses wanting to innovate with model-based design technology for cyber-physical systems. 

Our team played a key role in two EU Horizon 2020 Support Actions in the area of Cyber-Physical Systems. In TAMS4CPS we developed a research agenda for Transatlantic cooperation on modelling and simulation for CPSs, while in Road2CPS developed roadmaps, constituencies of interest and mechanisms to multiply the impact of CPS research. 


Teaching

I have the pleasure of developing and teaching on CSC3094 - the newly revised Stage 3 undergraduate modules on the capstone project, taken by all our undergraduate computer scientists. I supervise individual student projects at undergraduate and MSc level.


Many of the most influential computing and IT projects and products today are not solely mechanical, physical, electrical or electronic, but are developed by multidisciplinary teams, with digital and computing skills adding much of the value. In spite of this, there's a shortage of graduates who are experts in depth in one dicipline but who also have the skills to work successfully in such teams in the future.


Some years ago, I founded the MSc programme in Computer Security & Resilience, which is now our MSc in Cybersecurity.



Publications