Drawing on decades of experience in the welding of high strength steels for Defence I am working as a contractor providing specialty welding expertise including Hydrogen Assisted Cracking considerations for the welding of Australia's future submarine. I have also been writing the Commonwealth of Australia's requirements set for the welding of the future submarine.

After 30 years as a Defence scientist, who has worked on ships, submarines and aircraft, as of November 2020 I have entered a new phase of my professional life - I have finished up at DST and am ready for new challenges.

I actually took a pay cut to get back to my first love, submarines, and to reingage in the exciting Attack Class future submarine project. I was involved with the Collins Class build from the beginning and I wouldn't miss this new project for the world. In this role I have the dual responsibilities of leading a team looking at all aspects of submarine materials and submarine structural integrity, as well as a broader role of working with Leo de Yong to champion materials research across the DST Group. It's great to be at that point in one's career when I can reach back to my early work history to employ lessons learned from Australia's first submarine build project in our current project. In project terms I guess I'd be called a grey beard.

As part of the DST senior leadership team I had the privilege of leading researchers in the DST major science and technology capabilities of advanced metallic and composite airframe materials as well as aircraft forensic engineering.

Specialist in hydrogen assisted cold cracking - research into mechanisms of HACC in welds of high strength steel, HACC tests, those aspects of microstructure contributing to HACC propensity and practical assessment of HACC in built structure.

In this role most of my time was spent undertaking contract remanent life assessment of pressure equipment operating at elevated temperatures. This involved a lot of in-situ metallography as well as follow-on laboratory assessment of acetate replicas of steel and parent metal microstructure including transmission electron microscope analysis of carbide populations of extraction replicas taken from the in-service pressure vessels.

Provided academic tutoring in the fields of physics, mathematics, materials science and creative beekeeping