Prof.. Craig Mudge

Innovator, strategist, data science authority.

Profile

Craig has a passion for applying technology, especially informatics, to our nation’s major issues. He is Managing Partner of a strategy consultancy www.pacific-challenge.com advising CEOs and senior leadership teams on the strategic effects of evolving information technologies. He has a part-time research fellowship in CSIRO, working in data analytics and Big Data enabled by cloud computing.

In Sydney, Craig founded the Macquarie Institute for Innovation at Macquarie University, where he was Professor of Innovation. Believing that innovation and entrepreneurship are two sides of the same coin, he led the development of classes on management of innovation, intellectual property, and entrepreneurship across the life sciences and software industries.

Craig Mudge was a computer designer at DEC (now HP) in Boston, and a founder and CEO of computer chip company Austek Microsystems Ltd, spun out of CSIRO’s microelectronics research group in Adelaide. Austek produced chips for Personal Computer manufacturers in the US, for Cochlear, and the Australia Telescope. Its signal processing chips formed the basis of CSIRO’s Wireless WiFi patent.

Mudge returned to Australia in 2005 after ten years in Silicon Valley. There he led the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) Computer Science lab, the source of many information technologies that are commonplace today. Mudge was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering in 1985, has served on some thirty advisory boards and as a mentor in several accelerators, and was deputy chair of the Art Gallery of South Australia. Currently he serves on the Steering Committee of the new IBM Research Lab and was inducted into the Pearcey Hall of Fame.

Author of “Computer Engineering” with Gordon Bell he has published some seventy papers in computing, microchips, security, and Big Data. He holds six patents.

Craig holds a degree from the ANU in mathematics and statistics and a PhD in computer science from UNC at Chapel Hill. His formal management education occurred at the Australian Graduate School of Management and Harvard Business School.