Dean of Science
Professor Alan Dearle
Alan Dearle, BSc, PhD is Dean of the Faculty of Science. He is an experimental Computer Scientist whose primary research interests are in the confluence of programming languages, databases, middleware, distributed systems and operating systems. He is a double graduate of St Andrews University completing a Bachelors degree in 1983 and a PhD on Persistent Programming Environments in 1988 under the supervision of Professor Ron Morrison. After graduating he became a lecturer in Computational Science at St Andrews University. In 1990 he moved to Senior Lecturer position at The University of Adelaide, becoming a reader in Computer Science in 1992. Whilst at Adelaide he continued to work with the St Andrews group on persistent systems in addition to working on persistent distributed shared memory address systems. The lessons learned from this work led to him to create the Grasshopper Persistent Operating System with Professor John Rosenberg of Sydney University in 1992. In 1994 he moved to The University of Stirling to take up a chair in Computing Science and worked on log structured storage and an exo-kernel operating system. In 1999, Prof. Dearle returned to St Andrews to take up a chair in Computer Science. At St Andrews he has worked on reflective middleware, global ubiquitous computing, computation in appropriate geographical locations, P2P systems and most recently languages for sensor nets. Throughout his career he has maintained close links with industry and has been a consultant to Iona Technology, Reuters Research and Standards Group, Enigmatec Corp. and is currently on the technical advisory board of Cloudsoft Corp. As well as continuing to be an active researcher and committed teacher, he has served in various senior academic roles including Head of Computer Science at both Stirling and St Andrews.