Professor Allan Paull
Allan Paull has worked for 25 years in hypersonics, primarily in the field of supersonic combustion and has a PhD in applied mathematics and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. He has been employed at NASA Langley Research Center (USA), DLR (Germany) and GASL (USA) and the University of Queensland (UQ) where he held the position of an ARC Professor, an Australian Research Council (ARC) Professorial Research Fellow and a UQ Research Professor. He is a new member of the Australian Academy of Technical Sciences.
As a research fellow he was primarily employed as an experimentalist and was a member of a team that was the first to demonstrate positive thrust of a scramjet. At UQ he was also the HyShot flight program manager, leading a team that completed four hypersonic flight tests of scramjet related experiments, one of which was the first to demonstrate supersonic combustion in flight. He was also the technical lead to HyCAUSE, a Mach 10 flight combustion experiment.
For the past 10 years, Allan has been taking hypersonic scientific experiments performed in the laboratory to flight, leading a team which developed infrastructure, flight hardware as well as software to provide scientific leads with the data they require. He has completed nine hypersonic flight experiments is employed by the Federal Government Defence Science and Technology Organisation as the Technical Lead to HIFiRE, charged with the responsibility to complete another four flights by 2015. These flights include re-entry gliders as well as hypersonic scramjet powered autonomous aircraft capable of flight at Mach 8 for thirty seconds.
In his spare time, Allan has developed and operated a farm, built a high speed catamaran and was an active member of the Rural Fire Brigade 1990–2004.