Professor Samuel Drake

Sam Drake's research focuses on Spectrum Security. Spectrum security is about ensuring that information transmitted by electromagnetic waves is received by the intended recipients uncorrupted. It also concerned with detection, identification and localisation of electromagnetic transmitters.

Sam Drake completed his Bachelor of Science degree with first class honours at the University of Melbourne. His honours thesis was a study of chaos in the special relativistic dynamics. Soon after the commencement of his PhD Sam transferred to the Mathematical Physics Group at the University of Adelaide. Sam’s PhD thesis was on axisymmetric space-times in general relativity. Upon completion of his PhD Sam took a post-doctoral position at the University of Padua in Italy studying the formation of non-Keplerian disks about rotating dense stars.

Following the completion of post-doctoral research Sam took up a position as research scientist in the Australian public service. In this role Sam has represented Australia as a subject matter expert in government-to-government collaborations with Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Sam has worked with Raytheon and Boeing to develop electromagnetic security systems for Australian fighter jets.

Sam’s understanding of the gravitational time dilation effects on Global Position System (GPS) satellites proved to be extremely valuable. Prior to the wide-spread use of global satellite navigation relativity theory wasn’t seen as having any engineering applications. Sam’s research has shown that the theory of relativity can be applied not only to satellite navigation but also to data fusion and electromagnetic emitter localisation. Sam has been so successful in demonstrating the applications of relativity theory that he now teaches a course on it. To the best of his knowledge, it is the only course of its kind offered in world.