Burrows engineers product development

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 30, 2005

Dr Andy Burrows has joined Perceptive Engineering as Product Development Director after 19 years in a variety of software and engineering roles in industries ranging from defence to computing.

Perceptive Engineering, based in Lymm, Cheshire has announced the appointment of Dr Andy Burrows.

He joins Perceptive Engineering as Product Development Director in May 2005 after 19 years in a variety of software and engineering roles in industries ranging from defence to computing.

Burrows graduated from York University with a 1st class honours in mathematics and later from Manchester University with a PhD in computational fluid dynamics.

In between these degrees he worked for GEC Avionics on radar telemetry analysis and modelling.

Following his PhD he joined the Dynamics Research Group in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Manchester, working there for 4 years on a number of projects including Airbus and Concorde ground vibration testing for BAe, vehicle sound and vibration test analysis software for the Ford Motor Company and technical authorship and consultancy for LMS.

During this time Burrows developed, with a colleague DrKeith Worden (now Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Sheffield University), neural network and genetic algorithm packages for use in departmental research, resulting in a number of papers.

As a founding member of the Control Technology Centre at the University of Manchester and later an employee of Predictive Control he moved into the development and maintenance of software for industrial process control.

During this 5 year period he was involved in work in Fortran, C and lately Java on a wide variety of hardware platforms, supporting among other things the Connoisseur package.

He was also instrumental in the porting of the Connoisseur package first to C, and then to Java for the graphical displays to allow the package to run on MS Windows.

Leaving Predictive Control following their acquisition by Siebe he joined Sun Microsystems in 1999, working initially in technical pre-sales as a performance specialist conducting competitive benchmarks, later transferring to Sun's engineering team working on the Solaris operating system (Sun's Unix implementation), again specialising in performance issues.

During this time he gained experience of performance characteristics of a number of competitor's operating systems including HP-UX and various flavours of Linux, as well as major applications such as Oracle.

As a result of his operating system performance work he currently has a US patent submitted on system performance prediction.

Commenting on the appointment, David Lovett, Managing Director, said: "Andrew brings significant skills both as a mathematician and software developer".

"His understanding of our core technologies combined with the high integrity software development experiences gained at Sun make him the ideal person to lead our development team".

"He will be focusing initially on the enhancement of Perceptive's APC Design system and supporting the modularisation of Perceptive solutions".

"Andrew will be closely relating to the activities at the University of Manchester Control Systems Centre, integrating the new ideas, and prototypes, into our products as they become industrially proven".