About
Geoff Merrett is Professor of Electronic and Software Systems at the University of Southampton, Head of the Centre for Internet of Things (IoT) and Pervasive Systems, and Co-Director of the Arm-ECS Research Centre. He received the BEng and PhD degrees from Southampton in 2004 and 2009 respectively. He was appointed as a Lecturer shortly after, promoted to Associate Professor in 2014, and Professor in 2019. His research interests are in energy management of mobile/embedded systems and self-powered devices, and he has published over 200 papers in these areas. He has received a number of Best Paper awards and nominations, and he has given invited talks at leading workshops, conferences and research groups. He is currently Southampton PI on the £1.2M EPSRC International Centre for Spatial Computational Learning, and Deputy Director of the £1.4M EPSRC Platform Grant on Smart Cities, having previously been an investigator on PRiME, Graceful, and Holistic Energy Harvesting.
He has served on the EPSRC Strategic Advisory Team (SAT) for the ICT theme since 2019, the eFutures Steering Group, and co-manages the UK’s Energy Harvesting Network. He is a member of EPSRC College and the UKRI FLF Panel College, and also reviews proposals for national funders in Italy and the Netherlands. He is an active reviewer for a number of prestigious international journals and conferences, is Associate Editor for IET CDT, MDPI Sensors, and a guest editor for numerous special issues. He co-edited the IET book on Many Core Computing: Hardware and Software, was General Chair of EWME 2016, and was a founder of the ENSsys workshop (co-located with ACM SenSys since 2013), serving as General Chair from 2013-15, and on its steering/organisation committees since 2016.
Professor Merrett currently leads a team of 1 research staff and 11 PhD students, and has successfully graduated 20 PhD students. He is Director of Outreach and Recruitment in ECS, and has led on a number of significant outreach projects including the ECS Summer Taster Courses and A-Level Electronic Engineering Teaching Kits, both of which have been nominated for VC Teaching Awards. He is an MSc External Examiner at the University of York, and serves on the UK Electronics Skills Foundation's Strategic Advisory Group. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Member of IET, and a Fellow of the HEA.
*information correct as of August 2021
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Energy management of mobile/embedded systems
- Self-powered computing
- Internet of Things
Current research
His research interests are in energy management of mobile/embedded systems and self-powered devices. He has published over 200 papers in these areas, with 3500 citations, an h-index of 30 and a g-index of 52*1. His papers have received Best Paper awards (IJCAI 2013, ICCES 2017, PECCS 2018) and were Best Paper finalists (DATE 2011/15/16, CODES-ISSS 2017, IEEE TCAD). He has given invited talks at leading workshops, conferences and research groups (e.g. DAC, DATE, Arm Research Summit, ETH Zurich). He is currently Deputy Director of a £1.4M EPSRC Platform Grant on Smart Cities (EP/P010164/1), and Southampton PI on the £1.2M EPSRC International Centre for Spatial Computational Learning (EP/S030069/1). He was previously a Theme Leader on the £5.6M EPSRC-funded PRiME Programme Grant (EP/K034448/1), Southampton PI on the £1.3M EPSRC ‘Graceful’ many-core computing project (EP/L000563/1), and a Co-I on both the EPSRC Holistic Energy Harvesting project (EP/G067740/1) and the EPSRC Energy Harvesting Network (EP/H013458/1).
*information correct as of August 2021
Research projects
Active projects
Completed projects
Publications
Supervision
Current PhD Students
Teaching
At Southampton, he leads and teaches on a number of well-received lecture, lab, and project based modules. In 2021, he was shortlisted for a Southampton University Student's Union award for Most Engaging Lecturer. He has a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, has supervised 125 UG/PGT project students, and continually seeks to improve his teaching. He led on the creation of a new MSc Internet of Things (IoT) degree programme at Southampton, uniquely designed to recruit students from both EEE and computing backgrounds. He has designed substantial educational material and delivered it to UG/PGT students, college teachers and students, and academic/industrial researchers. Internationally, he played a key role in the launch of the EEE degree at the University’s Malaysia campus, teaching there for two weeks every year from 2013-17. Having previously served as Senior Admissions Tutor for ECS' EEE degree programmes, Professor Merrett is currently Director of Outreach and Recruitment in the Department. In this role, he has overseen major projects for ECS’ public website, created ECS’ first outreach strategy, and led on a number of significant outreach projects (e.g. the ECS Summer Taster Courses, which were nominated for a VC Teaching Award in 2017, and the A-Level Electronic Engineering Teaching Kits, which received a VC Teaching Award in 2019).
Professor Merrett is External Examiner at the University of York for their MSc Embedded Wireless Systems and MSc Digital Systems Engineering degree programmes. He was General Chair of the 11th European Workshop on Microelectronics Education (EWME) in 2016, where he also published a paper on the use of innovative online lectures (for which he received funding from the National HESTEM Programme, and a VC Teaching Award in 2011). He now serves on the Workshop’s Steering Committee. He has been Branch Counsellor of the University’s IEEE Student Branch since 2010, and received the IEEE R8 ‘Outstanding Counsellor’ award in 2013. He has been Southampton’s academic representative for the UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF) since 2011, a collaboration between industry and universities which, alongside promoting a career in electronics, provides scholarships, summer employment and industrial mentoring to undergraduates. In 2016 he was invited to join the UKESF’s Strategic Advisory Group, and helped to guide activities, took part in a roundtable discussion with government ministers on the engineering skills gap, and presented at their 5-year celebration event and the TechWorks Industry Summit 2018.
*information correct as of August 2021