B.Sc., B.E. (Hons.), Ph.D., FIEAust, SMIEEE, MAICD, RPEQ

Dr. Vaughan Clarkson is the founder of Whipbird Signals.  He has been CEO and managing director since its inception as a company on 29th October, 2020.  He has over thirty years experience in defence science & technology and in academia.

Prior to becoming CEO of Whipbird Signals Pty. Ltd., he was principal of the predecessor consultancy, also trading as Whipbird Signals.  He held this role in a full-time capacity from July, 2016.

From 1998 to 2016, Vaughan was an academic at The University of Melbourne and then The University of Queensland.  He remains an Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology.

Vaughan started his career at the Defence Science & Technology Organisation, where he rose from Cadet to Research Scientist in the EW Division.

B.E (Hons.), B.I.T., Ph.D.

Dr. Troy Kilpatrick is co-owner of Whipbird Signals.  He has been CTO since 4th January 2021. He has 13 years experience in the design, development and testing of radar systems for the defence industry.

In his previous role as CTO of Teledyne Defence Australia,Troy was technical authority for seven radar system development projects including both MIMO and phased-array systems. He was responsible for all aspects of the radar design, including system-level design, digital design, algorithm development, FPGA firmware, signal processing software (C/GPGPU/FPGA/Matlab) and RF systems.

While in this role, Troy also completed his Ph.D. at the University of Queensland. His main topics were radar-assisted helicopter landing, sidelobe suppression and super-resolution imaging using non-linear optimisation. His other research interests have included nearfield imaging techniques and radar target classification utilising machine learning.

B.Sc, B.E. (Hons), Ph. D, RPEQ, NER

Dr. Robby McKilliam joined Whipbird Signals on May 30th 2022. He has over 15 years experience in design and implementation of signal-processing algorithms. After completing a PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland in Dec 2010 he worked as a Research Fellow and later Senior Research Fellow at the University of South Australia (UniSA). He left UniSA in December 2015 as the first employee of Myriota Pty Ltd where he helped grow and lead a team of software and electrical engineers in the design and implementation of Myriota's low power, low cost, massive scale, and secure satellite communication system.

Robby has authored 38 publications and 10 patents in engineering and mathematics fields. He is an experienced software engineer with particular expertise and interest in communications, control, and radar signal processing, computer security and cryptography, statistical signal processing and estimation theory, and applied computational number theory.

B.E.(Hons.), B.Inf.Tech., M.S.E.E., Ph.D., SMIEEE

Dr. Jason Williams joined Whipbird Signals in 2023 with over 20 years of experience in estimation, multi-object tracking, sensor resource management and autonomous systems. He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked at the Defence Science and Technology Group, as a Senior Research Scientist in sensor fusion. Subsequently, he worked in CSIRO’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group, in roles including the Technical Lead of Team CSIRO Data61, which placed second in the international DARPA Subterranean Challenge, Team Lead for Robotic Autonomy, and Group Leader. He started his career working in Electronic Warfare in the Royal Australian Air Force.

Jason has received awards including the CSIRO Chair’s Medal for Science and Engineering Excellence, the M. Barry Carlton Award for the Best Paper in the IEEE Transactions in Aerospace and Electronic Systems, the DSTG Award for Science Excellence, the DSTO Award for Outstanding Contributions to Defence Outcomes, and the E-Systems Commander’s Trophy for Excellence in Electronic Warfare.

B.E.(Hons.), Ph.D., GAICD, GCELead, FIEAust, SMIEE, RPEQ

Dr. Andrew Bradley has over 30 years of experience in pattern recognition, machine learning and AI working across academia, industry, and start-up companies. He has an international reputation in statistical signal processing, especially for the development and evaluation of machine learning systems in safety critical and regulated environments such as medical imaging and computer aided diagnosis.

In his previous role as Associate Dean of Research and Innovation for the Science and Engineering Faculty at QUT, Andrew was responsible for the research activity across ten schools, with oversight of over $50M in external research income. Prior to this he was Principal Biomedical Engineer for Maxwell Plus, a company developing novel diagnostic tools powered by Artificial Intelligence and multi-parametric MRI; CTO for Ausonex, a company specialising in the design and development of automated hearing test instruments; and Principal Research Engineer for Canon Information Systems Research Australia. In 2011 he was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship based on long-term collaboration with MonoGen Inc. a quantitative pathology company based in the United States.

Andrew has published more than 170 papers and is a named inventor on 18 patents granted in the USA, Japan, and Europe. He remains an adjunct Professor and Queensland University of Technology.