The University of Queensland Vice-Chancellor Professor Paul Greenfield has congratulated two Queenslanders with UQ affiliations who tonight will be honoured at the ATSE Clunies Ross Awards at the Sofitel, Brisbane.
• Emeritus Professor Raymond Stalker AO of the Division of Mechanical Engineering will receive a Lifetime Contribution Award.
As Australia’s first professor of space engineering, he has made the search for economical access to space the primary purpose of his career, demonstrating pioneering originality and persistence over more than 50 years. Professor Stalker is an international leader in scramjet technology (scramjets are types of very fast jet engines, which travel at five times the speed of sound or more).
He invented the Free Piston Shock Tunnel which made it possible, for the first time, to perform wind tunnel research at Earth orbital velocity. The resulting “Stalker Tubes” are now used internationally by research teams, racing to perfect the world’s first scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) engine.
He moved to The University of Queensland in 1977 and led its space engineering program for two decades until his retirement. In 1993 Professor Stalker and his colleagues Professor Allan Paul and Associate Professor David Mee were the first in the world to show that scramjets could achieve more thrust than drag — the essence of flight — in ground testing in UQ's T4 shock tunnel.
In 2002, The University of Queensland's HyShot group followed this up with a scramjet flight at Woomera, the first group in the world to produce supersonic combustion in flight.
Listen to an interview between UQ Adjunct Professor Robyn Williams and Professor Stalker.
• Dr David Noon, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager - Technology and Sales of GroundProbe Pty Ltd in Brisbane is one of the five ATSE Clunies Ross award recipients to be announced tonight.
He will receive an award for his continuous on-line system that integrates radar and visual images to remotely measure small movements of rock walls in large open-pit mines, preventing injury and saving lives and equipment damage in open pit mines in Australia and overseas.
Dr Noon was formerly a researcher with the Cooperative Research Centre for Sensor Signal Processing and Information Processing based at UQ. He and a team at UQ developed the first Slope Stability Radar System. In 2003 David co-founded GroundProbe and this technological advance was taken to the world. He is a UQ graduate — Bachelor of Engineering with first class honours (1991) and PhD (1995).
Last year's award winners included the co-inventor of the cervical cancer vaccine, UQ's Professor Ian Frazer, Director of the Diamantina Institute for Cancer Immunology and Metabolic Medicine.
Media: Jan King 0413 601 248.
