After nine years of exemplary leadership, Adrian Pearce left the DSI Directorship at the end of May. Adrian has guided DSI through many celebrations and challenges including welcoming Tasmania to the DSI family; the increase in national co-operation with the creation of ADSUN; and supporting the sector through a global pandemic.
During Adrian’s time, DSI has distributed more than $10M in research funding; supported more than 70 PhD students in their studies; introduced the highly successful undergraduate internship program; trained and presented more than 200 SMEs and research groups at PitchFests; and helped Victorian universities and companies attract more than $20M in funding from our international allies.
Adrian’s tenure has been marked by a spirit of co-operation, collaboration and inclusiveness that is focused on delivering the best outcomes possible for all. All the while he has also played key roles in establishing other ventures such as the Cremorne Digital Hub and the Future Battery Industries CRC and leadership roles within our host School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne.
We thank Adrian for his steady guidance and friendship.
Please join us in welcoming Toby Murray as our new DSI Director. Toby has been learning the ropes as Deputy Director since 2021 and in addition to an outstanding academic background in cybersecurity brings a wealth of experience working on defence-related research with DSTG and other collaborators.
Toby’s work is recognised internationally. In 2022, he was a joint winner of the Association for Computing Machinery Software System Award. The award recognised Toby’s contribution as a member of the team led by Gernot Heisner, which developed the seL4 kernel. The seL4 kernel has set the bar for how secure systems should be engineered and showed that performance does not have to be sacrificed in pursuit of system security. Toby has also been successful in gaining funding for his work from numerous international sources, including US Defense agencies.
With colleagues at DSTG, Toby co-led the cross-institutional team that developed the Cross Domain Desktop Compositor (CDDC). The CDDC has been recognised with the 2021 Eureka Prize for Outstanding Science in Safeguarding Australia and 2017 iAwards for Research and Development Project of the Year and Infrastructure and Platforms Innovation of the Year.
As we transition to our new Director we are very pleased that Adrian will continue to have involvement with DSI as Toby begins to steer us into the future.
