Dr Toby Boyson

Dr Toby Boyson is a Senior Lecturer in electrical engineering at the School of Engineering and Information Technology at UNSW Canberra.  He completed a Bachelor of Science in physics and chemistry at ANU, graduating with first class honours in 2007.  He received his PhD in electrical engineering in 2012 from UNSW, for the development and experimental validation of a new type of cavity ringdown spectroscopy.  

Dr Boyson worked as a postdoctoral fellow for Professor Ian Petersen (now at ANU), Associate Professor Charles Harb (now Chief Executive Officer, Ring IR Inc.), and Associate Professor Sean O'Byrne (UNSW Canberra) before taking his current position as an education focussed lecturer.  He has designed and built optoelectronic instrumentation to measure explosives and chemical warfare agents,  to characterise hypersonic flows, and to validate new control algorithms.  Instrumentation and signal processing techniques he helped develop have been a finalists at the UNSW Innovation awards (2012), and the Australian Museum Eureka Prize (2015).  He holds several patents and patent applications in signal processing and spectroscopic instrumentation that are being developed for commercialisation in the USA.  You can view his Google Scholar profile here.

Dr Boyson currently spends most of his time teaching analog circuit design and coordinating the Electrical Engineering degree: he is course co-ordinator for ZEIT3216 - Design of Electronic Circuits 3, ZEIT2207 - Design of Electronic Circuits 2, and ZEIT1208 - Introduction to Electrical Engineering  He also teaches into several other courses in the EE program. Dr Boyson is interested in all aspects of engineering education: he is particularly interested in the links between the affective and cognitive development of engineering students, problem solving and practical lab skills through the lens of cognitive load theory, and in increasing and maintaining the representation of women in engineering degrees.

He is the current co-chair (with Dr Bianca Capra) of YoWIE, an outreach designed to encourage young women to pursue STEM degrees and careers.