David Bruce Davidson

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David Bruce Davidson (born 1961 in London) is a South African electrical engineer who works at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He specializes in computational electromagnetics and the use of finite element methods for engineering applications. In 2012 he was named a Fellow of IEEE for his contributions to computational electromagnetics. He leads the engineering team at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (ICRAR), focusing on radio astronomy technologies including antenna design and electromagnetic simulations for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and the Murchison Widefield Array.

Education and early career: He earned BEng, BEng Hons, and MEng from the University of Pretoria (1982, 1983, 1986), all with honours. After serving in the South African Defence Force, he worked at CSIR Pretoria on defence electronics. In 1988 he became a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University and earned his PhD there in 1991 on parallel processing for computational electromagnetics. He became associate professor in 1992 and professor in 1996.

Sabbaticals and later studies: Davidson spent sabbaticals at the University of Arizona (1993), Trinity College Cambridge (1997), Delft University of Technology (2003), and other institutions. He earned a Doctor of Engineering (D.Eng) from Stellenbosch University in 2017.

Curtin University and research: Since joining Curtin in 2018, he has led work on radio astronomy instrumentation, including antenna design, computational electromagnetics, metrology, radio-frequency front ends, digital back-ends, calibration, and interferometry. He has published more than 50 journal papers and 100 conference papers, and authored the book Computational Electromagnetics for RF and Microwave Engineering (2005; 2nd ed. 2010).