Biography
Thomas Conway was born in Co Offaly, Ireland in 1970 and grew up on a cattle farm there. He graduated with a first class honors degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Limerick in 1991 winning the silver medal for coming first in the faculty of Engineering and Science. He then joined Hewlett Packard, Bristol as a design engineer working on servo and data channels for tape based magnetic recording. He returned to the University of Limerick in 1993 to undertake a PhD in detection methods for magnetic recording channels funded by Analog Devices and under the supervision of Dr. John Nelson. He joined Analog Devices, Limerick in in 1996 to work on their read channel development effort lead by Peter Real and moved to Adaptec Inc., Longmont, CO, USA in 1998 with that group. He was one of the first to publish the use of parity codes with partial response channels, a technique which became a staple of disk drive read channels in the 2000s. He joined the ECE dept at the University of Limerick as a Lecturer in 1999 and lead the Limerick team in the European project on two dimension optical data storage, TWODOS, which was lead by Philips Electronics, NL with teams from TU Eindhoven, NL and Lancaster, UK. He was a Science Foundation Ireland funded investigator in the mid 2000s, successfully supervising 3 PhDs each going on to work with industry across Europe. He started a private consultancy business ALTCWY, providing consultancy to a range of companies both within Ireland and internationally. One such project was completed with Philip Quinlan and his group in Analog Devices, Cork, where he developed the low power RISC processor used in successfulADI products such as the ADF7023 RF transceiver. In the 2010s, he turned his research to a life long interest in electric vehicles and sustainable energy, publishing in IEEE peer reviewed journals including the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.
He has been widely published with 14 IEEE Transactions journals of which he is the primary author on 9, as well as being a named inventor on 9 patents.