Professor Paddy Nixon is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Tasmania.

Previously he was UCD’s first Science Foundation Ireland Research Professor appointed in the area of Distributed Systems and Pervasive Systems.  He holds an B.Sc. in Computer Science, an M.A. (in j.o.) and an Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, is a chartered engineer and a member of the BCS, ACM and IEEE. While at UCD he led the Systems Research Group at UCD supported by a €€2.5m Science Foundation Ireland endowment for his chair. The group focused on fundamental problems in large scale distributed systems and brought that expertise to 2 major national centres in Software Engineering (Lero) and the SensorWeb (Clarity). Professor Nixon specialises in large scale distributed systems with a particular focus on software infrastructure including pervasive systems, sensor systems, middleware, web services, trust and privacy, and mobile systems. He has published over 220 publications including editing 9 books. He is programme chair for UBICOMP 2010 (the premier conference in ubiquitous computing) and has previously been programme or general chair for Pervasive, Percom, ECOOP, iTrust and MPAC. Previously he was an academic at Trinity College Dublin and was  Professor of Computer Science at Strathclyde University.

Professor Nixon has significant industrial and commercial experience. He has had active collaborations with INTEL, Microsoft Research, HP, Oracle and IBM. From 2007-2009 he was Academic Director of the INTEL Technology for Independent Living Centre ; INTEL’s largest University based research centre with direct funding of €30 million. He has been a founder of three start-ups and including being founder of NDRC Ltd an IP development company supported by a €€25 million investment by the Irish government. Professor Nixon was an IBM faculty fellow in Autonomics with the Dublin Centre for Advanced Studies.

Professor Nixon was Vice Principal for Research and Innovation for UCD between 2006-2009. He was responsible for Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences (EMPS). This College consists of 7 distinct Schools with over 210 fulltime academic staff, over 1000 PhD students, and a research income of over €20 million a year. During his tenure the College had a year-on-year increase in research funding of over 20% and attracted UCDs first two €15 million SFI Research Centres in Sensor Technologies and Systems Biology; along with three of the six national research cluster awards.

Professor Nixon has been a visiting academic/professor at Caltech, Warsaw University, and Kaunas University. He was chair of the EU Disappearing Computer Initiative and EU-NSF strategy project on Ambient Computing. He has given the prestigious Science and Society public lecture for the Royal Edinburgh Society. In 2008 he chaired the national public consultation debate for Next Generation Broadband for the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources.

Professor Nixon is on the board of the Menzies Research Institute, the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, the Integrated Marine Observing System, and the Tasmanian Institute for Agriculture.