Our Lecturers

Professor Victor Humphrey

Victor is a Professor of Acoustics in the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton. He has over thirty years of research experience in both underwater acoustics and medical ultrasound.

His interests include numerical modelling of transducers and fields; parametric arrays and their applications in the laboratory and at sea; techniques of measuring the acoustic properties of materials; acoustic scattering from structures; nonlinear propagation in tissues and its use to improve imaging in medical ultrasonics.

Victor has a keen interest in applied acoustics and the potential for cross fertilisation of ideas between different fields of acoustics. He has a wide experience of conveying acoustic concepts to students from a broad range of backgrounds.

Dr Paul Lepper

Paul is the Senior Research Fellow in the School of Electronic, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Loughborough University, UK. He is specialising in underwater acoustics, bioacoustics and underwater technologies. These include acoustic and optical underwater systems, sound field measurement, modelling and simulation. He is also working upon marine species hearing as well as the acoustic impact of noise on marine fauna.

Paul’s research topics include measurement and characterisation of underwater noise sources and the assessment of noise impact on marine fauna. These topics have included work to assess the construction noise from several offshore windfarm developments. They also involve investigation of various petroleum platforms and include projects looking at noise from small leisure craft.

Source characterisation, sound field modelling and modelling marine species exposure are treated by Paul. He is also involved in projects to assess hearing abilities of marine mammals and the use of acoustic deterrents. Furthermore, he is involved in the development of various systems for long term noise field assessment and passive detection of marine species and the use of various propagation models for sound field assessment.

Dr Peter Dobbins

Peter has over 40 years of engineering and physics experience, working in underwater acoustics since 1975 when he joined Ultra Electronics. Peter has an Open University 1st Class Honours degree and a PhD from the University of Bath for work carried out at BAE SYSTEMS on the degradation of sonar performance due to inhomogeneities in the sea. Peter was a Principal Acoustics Consultant with BAE SYSTEMS until 2002. After BAE SYSTEMS, he spent some time as a Research Officer with the Department of Physics at the University of Bath. His principal interest was developing 3-D imaging algorithms for a multistatic sonar system.

Peter left Bath and went to SEA, Bristol, in 2005 where he worked partly on research projects related to marine mammals and novel waveforms, but mainly on product development programmes. Peter moved to Ultra Electronics, Weymouth, in 2010, where he has continued his interests in marine mammal monitoring, expanding the range of applications into the renewable energy field and covering active as well as passive systems. He has also been working on a range of conventional sonars.