Profile of Dr. Willie Donnelly, Head of Research & Innovation

Dr. William Donnelly has been at the forefront of the European Telecommunications Management research and development industry since 1991. He received a BSc in Physics and Mathematics from Dublin Institute of Technology in 1984 and a PhD in experimental physics from UCD in 1989. He worked in the telecommunications industry from graduation to 1996 when he joined Waterford Institute of Technology. He co-founded the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group in 1996, which has grown from 3 to 150 people and has received over €55M in competitive funding to date http://www.tssg.org/. In 2004 WIT established the School of Research and Innovation with Dr. Donnelly being appointed as Head of Research at executive level.

Since occupying this position Dr. Donnelly has restructured research activity within the Institute from individual researchers to research clusters supported by individual research strategies in line with the Institute’s research strategy. The impact of this strategic approach and institutional leadership has been the consolidation of distinct institutional research competencies in the areas of pharmaceutical and molecular biotechnology research, material research, and eco – innovation, in addition to telecommunications.  The reorganisation of research activity has resulted in a major increase in funding to 22MEuro in 2009. 

Research Interest - Summary

Dr. Donnelly’s main research interest is in telecommunications Network Management with particular emphasis on Autonomic Network Management, Bio-inspired network management techniques and the challenges of managing the future internet.

Key research activity includes:

• Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) PI leading a 6MEuro research cluster “The Federated, Autonomic Management of End-to-end Communication Services (FAME)” which follows on from my previous SRC cluster on Autonomic Management of Communications Networks and Services (AMCNS).  It brings together the major Irish based academic (TCD, NUIM, UCD) and industry (CISCO, IBM, Alcatel Lucent and Ericsson) players in the telecommunications management space. Dr Donnelly's previously funded SFI project on Autonomic Network Management helped define the research area of Autonomic Network Management.  

• PI HEA PRTLI project Serving Society: Management of Future Communications Networks and Services investing the management of user centric services in Next Generation Networks (Future Internet). The academic partners are Interaction Design Centre in the University of Limerick and the Hamilton Institute in Maynooth University. 

• Principle Investigator Enterprise Ireland Industry Lead Research Cluster (IMS ARCS) in the area of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) services. The cluster comprises 20 Irish companies working in the wireless services market.

Dr. Donnelly has supervised over 20 MSc and PhD students in the period 1996-2008 in WIT, and is currently supervising 5 PhD students.

National Profile

Dr. Donnelly served as a board member on the Irish Council for Science, Engineering and Technology from 2001 to 2006. He has served as a member of numerous national advisory groups including the Advisory Science Council Research Careers Task Force (2007), the Forfás wireless working group (2004), the communications management working group (2002-3) and the Marine Institute working group on future research (2006). He has served as an expert evaluator for Enterprise Ireland on their commercialisation programme.  He has been an invited speaker on a number of national telecommunications conferences hosted by IDA and Enterprise Ireland.

International Leadership

He has played a leading role in the European IST/ICT framework programme since 1989. The TSSG is now the most successful Irish academic/industrial participant in the IST FP6 & FP7 programmes with 7 funded projects and 2 in negotiation for FP7 (funded in 2007). This has placed WIT and the TSSG at the forefront of both the Autonomic Communications and Future Internet initiatives (DG-INFSO Units D1 Future Internet & F4 FIRE). Under the FP6 programme he chaired a series of joint EU/USA sponsored workshops on Trust and Security strategies for ICT. This activity has been expanded in FP7 to include Japan, China, Canada, Australia and Korea (under the Inco-Trust project).

Funding Success 2006 -2008

In the past two years, under Dr. Donnelly’s leadership, WIT has secured new research funding of approx. €33.2m including:

• Basic research funding : HEA: PRTLI Cycle 4, SFI: SRC

• Applied research funding : EU: FP7

• Commercialisation funding : Enterprise Ireland, & EU eTEN

Through his dedication and commitment to research Dr. Donnelly continues to empower and lead the research community at WIT, and with his guidance the Institute will continue to build and strengthen its research infrastructure in the areas that are of utmost strategic value.