John McAllister

John McAllister is a Professor and Deputy Head of School at Queen's University Belfast's School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focuses on custom hardware design for FPGA-based embedded/edge computing, signal processing, and machine learning applications, with a particular emphasis on neuromorphic computing, quantum computing, and dataflow architectures. He leads projects such as FPGA Acceleration of SDR Algorithms and picoStream Streaming Multiprocessors, and has supervised work in embedded systems and wearables.

Research Interests:

• Custom FPGA Hardware and High-Level Synthesis
• Edge Computing and Cyber-Physical Systems
• Signal Processing Systems
• Dataflow Computing
• Neuromorphic Computing
• Quantum Computing

Notable Awards:

• Best Paper Prize (2011, 2007)
• Certificate of Merit (2017)
• Higher Education Academy Fellowship (2007)

Grants & Collaborations:

• R3500ECS: Arm Morello UAV Security (2023–)
• R8848CSC: FPGA SDR Acceleration (2017–)
• R3797CSC: Exascale picoStream (2016–2018)

Labs/Teams: Active in the Institute of Electronics, Communications & Information Technology, leading interdisciplinary projects in quantum circuit optimization and FPGA-based signal processing.