Associate Professor in Broadcast Engineering

School of Computing and Digital Technology

Location:     City Centre Campus (Millennium Point)
Salary:     £55,091 to £59,880 per annum 
Closing Date:     Tuesday 02 March 2021
Interview Date:     To be confirmed
Reference:     012021-21

Located in a modern £300M campus in the heart of Birmingham, the School of Computing and Digital Technology is a thriving, vibrant, and inspiring learning community committed to excellence in research, high quality teaching and impactful industrial engagement. Building on continuous success in student growth and in sustained advancement of research activities, the school has embarked on a programme of extensive expansion funded by substantial long-term investments. 

Our growing teams are teaching, exploring and practising in some of the most exciting areas in the field of computing and the processing of digital media. Our research groups include the DMT Lab (who specialise in research around augmented/virtual reality systems, accessibility and assistive technology, multimodal interfaces, future networks, and audio/music information retrieval); data science and big data analytics, and cybersecurity and digital forensics.

We are a practice-based school, making our teaching and research relevant to the evolving market for computer skills by partnering with local and global enterprise in areas such as smart cities, medical applications, the media production and broadcast industry, and IoT applications. We work in a collaborative and cross disciplinary culture, where interacting freely across the school and with colleagues is encouraged to gain a unique insight into impactful problem domains. 

We invite applications to join our integrated teaching and research teams in the DMT centre. For this role we are particularly seeking applicants who bring skills in Broadcast Systems, Communication Systems and Telecommunications applied to broadcast including signal processing, transmission and compression formats.

The Role

The role is to engage in both high-quality teaching and research and you will be committed to contributing in our continued success in delivering a wide range of undergraduate degrees, with a main focus to support our the broadcast engineering programmes delivered to apprentices drawn from leading UK and European broadcast organisations. The centre is expanding its work in this field for both research and consultancy. Candidates will be required to be currently active in either industry or academia and be focussed and enthusiastic to maintain the university’s presence and profile in these areas.

Duties and Responsibilities 

General

• Providing an excellent student experience. 
• Acting in accord with the University’s strategy, policy and procedures. 
• Reflective practice as a method for improving performance of yourself and collegiately.

Academic delivery

• Supervise student projects at undergraduate and postgraduate level, securing industry-mentored projects for the student body.
• Lead in the design and development of high quality, up-to-date broadcast engineering programmes.
• Teaching as a member of the Digital Media Technology team in a variety of settings from small group tutorials to large lectures both online and on campus.
• Ensuring the efficient delivery of teaching programmes in accordance with the University’s strategy, policy and procedures.
• Setting and marking of assessments and providing constructive feedback and feedforward. 
• Take a leading role in management, administration and development of the course provision within the school.

Research

• Lead research with colleagues of the Broadcast group to create high quality outputs leading to publications in reputable journals and conference proceedings 
• Lead in developing successful bids and partnerships for research funding. 
• Participate in and orchestrate outreach activities to aid in recruitment. 
• Lead in enterprise activity and partnership generation.

Skills and Experience 

Essential

General

• Hold a PhD in a related technical subject, or significant industry experience.
• Excellent team working and communication skills, successful networking and community management

Academic delivery

• Expert knowledge of audio visual technologies; compression technologies; transmission systems (including cable, fibre, radio, mobile); signal processing; broadcast application standards.  
• Applicants should have demonstrated excellent teaching in higher education or have presented regularly to technical audiences in an industry setting.
• Should be able to plan and deliver in broadcast engineering subject areas including:
• All broadcast architectures and platforms (cable, satellite, OTT/broadband, DTTV, mobile/5G, etc 
• Signal-level subject areas including compression, coding, transmission
• Applicable national and international standards
• IP workflows, playout systems, broadcast workflow systems
• SDN, Content delivery networks
• Industry commercial practices including network economics
• Upcoming developments in the industry

The candidate should preferably have industry experience (direct or collaborative) in at least one of these disciplines, and have a deep knowledge of most of these areas. 

Research

• Have a strong record of leading research teams, groups and conducting research supervision
• A proven record of attracting and securing research funding and partnering across your area of practice. 
• Internationally recognised excellence in creating and writing research publications

How to Apply

For an informal discussion of the post, please contact Dr Ian Williams on ian.williams@bcu.ac.uk .

With around 24,000 students from 80 countries, Birmingham City University is a large and diverse place to study. We put students at the heart of everything we do, giving them the best opportunities for future success. The University has an enviable reputation for providing quality, student-focused education in a professional and friendly environment. Our superb courses, state-of-the-art facilities, first-rate staff, and focus on practical skills and professional relevance is producing some of the country’s most employable graduates.

We put £270 million into the regional economy and support thousands of jobs in the area. We're investing £260 million in our estate, including a major expansion of our city centre campus at Eastside, providing students with an enviable range of facilities. The Complete University Guide ranked us as a top 30 UK university for spending on facilities in 2015.

Our staff and student community is defined by our core values, which outline who we are as a University and how we will work with each other. Our core values are Excellence, People focused, Partnership working and Fairness and integrity.

To apply for this role, complete the online application and upload a copy of your CV. Candidates are advised to remove personal information, including names to ensure a fair and transparent recruitment process.

The University is committed to internationalism and diversity and welcomes applications from all countries, faiths and backgrounds.

It is each individual successful applicants responsibility to ensure that they have permission to work in the UK. Some applicants may require sponsorship from the University and a visa from UKVI to take up the role if successful. More information on this can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/check-uk-visa 

Some roles are not capable of sponsorship because they do not meet the UKVI criteria relating to skill and salary level. If you are unsure as to whether you would require sponsorship if successful, or whether the role is capable of sponsorship, please contact us: RTinbox@bcu.ac.uk 

Please note on occasions where we receive a large number of applications, we may close the advert ahead of the publicised closing date. If this does happen, we will contact all candidates via email who have started but not yet completed their application, giving 48 hours’ notice.  We would therefore advise that you submit your completed application as soon as possible.