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Staff Profile

Dr Thomas McDonald

Research Associate

Background

Thomas McDonald is a researcher in the Centre of Excellence for Mobility and Transport within the School of Engineering at Newcastle University, UK, working on Subsurface Inspection Radar (SIR) for EU Horizon 'Climate Resilient & Environmentally Sustainable Transport Infrastructure, with a Focus on Inland Waterways’ (CRISTAL) Project.


He is a Data Visualisation Developer with extensive experience in Numerical Simulation, 2D and 3D Systems Visualisation, Electrotechnical Engineering in system design and implementation for automated data capture using sensing technologies, in particular, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) technology.  


In 2020, he graduated from The School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics at Newcastle University (UK) as a Master of Applied Mathematics for Visualisation of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), specialising in development of a unique Vortex Visualisation toolkit for MATLAB for simulation of Quantum Point-Vortex Dynamics. His dissertation on Point Vortex Motion and the Inverse Energy Cascade utilised the ROCKET high performance computing array to provide pioneering evidence of theorised point vortex system energy transfer from microscopic to macroscopic length scales, resulting in observed emergent clustering phenomena in Bose Einstein Condensates (BECs).  


Between 2020 – 2025 he has visualised complex phsycial systems, with a focus on novel 3D hybrid-rotational GPR datasets, as part of his PhD on the 'Development of 3D Visualisation Algorithms for the Effective Interpretation of Tunnel and Transport Subsurface Radar Data'. His work has developed the first 3D visualisations of new hybrid-rotational GPR datasets, alongside a python-based open source development platform for GPR researchers, in international collaboration with lead developers of state-of-the-art GPR simulation software gprMax and 2D data processing software GPRPy. He was awarded his PhD in Mechanical and Systems Engineering in June 2025. 


His work on GPR has been internationally recognised in 2022 and 2024 at the EU Transport Research Arena in the TRAVISIONS Young Researcher Competition. He is the first researcher to place as a finalist in two separate modalities (rail and waterborne respectively) across two separate research projects (Euromobilita T-Vision and CRISTAL).


He has also been an active coordinator for the 1st and 2nd Rail-Twin International Workshops and Summer School initiatives on Digital Twins in Railway Engineering & Rail-Related Products as part of the UK-China-BRI Countries Education Partnership Initiative. In 2022, he was invited to chair the workshop by hosting institution KMUTNB (Thailand). He has also being the lead UK secretary and an invited speaker at both the 2022 and 2023 events, the latter joint-hosted by SWJTU and UESTC (China). 

Publications