Radar engineer Professor Hugh Griffiths receives OBE
Professor Hugh Griffiths, a world authority in the field of radar research and the leading UK radar engineer of his generation, has received an OBE in the Queens New Years Honours for his services to the engineering profession. Prof. Griffiths (right) is the Thales/Royal Academy of Engineering Chair of RF Sensors at UCL and a long-established volunteer for the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).
Nominated by the IET, he was awarded the honour for his ground-breaking research in the continuing development of radar systems, including bistatic radar and its applications, and his influential role as a research engineer, educator and scientific advisor.
On learning of his OBE, Professor Griffiths said: “I am thrilled at this honour, which recognises the importance of radar in the UK and worldwide.
"I am hugely grateful to all of the engineers and scientists who I have worked with and learned from over the years.”
Mike Carr, IET President, said: “It is fantastic to see Prof. Griffiths awarded with an OBE in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list and to have his achievements and services to engineering recognised in this way.
“His research has allowed the design of greatly improved radars for a wide range of applications including air traffic control, geophysical remote sensing, defence and security.
“It is a great way to end 2018 – the Government’s Year of Engineering - and celebrate the vast contribution engineering and technology makes to advancing the world around us for the benefit of society.”
Prof. Griffiths received the IET A F Harvey Prize in 2012 – a global research prize which was awarded to aid his developmental research into the topic of bistatic radar.
He has contributed voluntarily to the Institution of Engineering and Technology (formerly the Institution of Electrical Engineers) throughout his career, as member and chair of technical interest groups and honorary editor of professional peer-reviewed publications. He has made similar contributions to the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, of which he was President from 2012-2014.
Prof. Griffiths devised a technique for the design of radar waveforms with ultra-low range sidelobes (better than –60 dB) over a wide Doppler bandwidth from 1992. The technique was adopted commercially and is now used in spaceborne radars for the measurement of precipitation. In more recent work he has shown how even better performance (–70 dB range sidelobes) can be achieved with a continuous non-linear FM waveform.
He conceived and developed a technique to utilise multiple narrow-band transmissions in a multistatic configuration to provide high-resolution imaging of targets, essentially using the spatial bandwidth rather than the frequency-domain bandwidth to provide the high resolution. This radar tomography technique has been adopted successfully for commercial use.
He is Chair of the Defence Science Expert Committee (DSEC) for the UK Ministry of Defence and served on the Supervisory Board for the UK Ministry of Defence's Defence Technology Centre in ElectroMagnetic Remote Sensing. He chaired the Working Group for the IEEE Radar Definitions Standard (IEEE 686).
He was educated at Keble College, Oxford University, where he received an MA degree in Physics. He received a PhD in 1986 and a DSc(Eng) in 2000 from the University of London. He has worked at University College London since 1982, serving as Head of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering from 2001 to 2006.