David A. Lowther, Ph.D., FCAE, M.IEE, M.IEEE

Dr. Lowther is a founder and president of Infolytica Corporation. He serves as chief financial officer and guides the company's product development. Dr. Lowther is responsible for the direction of Infolytica's software.

Dr. Lowther has been involved in the area of analysis of electromagnetic devices and the computer aided design of such systems for 30 years. He has published over 200 papers in the area and has one book on CAD in Magnetics. This book, co-authored with Dr. P. Silvester, has become one of the reference texts for magnetic device designers. He obtained his Ph.D. in an experimental area involving the design of linear induction machines for high speed transportation and then moved to Imperial College, London, U.K. for 6 years of post-doctoral experience working with Dr. C.J. Carpenter, the developer of the T-omega formulation which is the basis of many commercial three-dimensional analysis codes. At Imperial, he was involved in designing an instrumentation computer and constructing and fully instrumenting a scale model of the end region of a large electrical machine. This work was complemented by theoretical work on eddy current losses in end regions.

In 1978, recognizing the potential of the desktop computer and the power of finite element method, Dr. Lowther, together with Drs. Silvester and Freeman, founded Infolytica. This was the world's first company providing full scale, commercial level magnetics analysis tools on a desktop machine. The system, MagNet, provided many innovations for its time. It provided an interactive, menu-driven interface based on raster graphics technology and utilized high-speed iterative solvers. Both of these have become the norm for almost all the commercial codes in the world.

In 1979, he took up a position as an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at McGill University, working with Professor P.Silvester and, in 1986, was promoted to Full Professor. Since 1998 he has been the Chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill.

Through the company, Dr. Lowther has had experience of a large range of commercial problems and the difficulties facing magnetics designers and this has directed both his research work and the direction of MagNet development. Currently his interests include the solution of the inverse problem and the automation of the design process. This has involved adding some aspects of artificial intelligence to MagNet in order to speed up some of its operations and to improve its ease of use.

Professor Lowther was involved in presenting several papers at the first Compumag Conference in Oxford in 1976 and was asked to become a member of the International Steering Committee of the Conference in 1978. He was an active participant in this committee until 1993 when he became involved in the creation of the International Compumag Society. He was part of the committee that designed the initial constitution of the Society and was elected to the first Board. Since 1995, he has been a Board Member for the Americas and Vice-President of the Society for North America.

His major research interests are in the numerical simulation and design of low frequency electromagnetic devices. He has applied techniques from the areas of artificial intelligence, computer graphics and numerical analysis to the development of intelligent design systems which can function as advisers to human designers.

His achievements in electromagnetic research and engineering were recognized 1999, when he was elected as a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.

For more information on Dr. Lowther, please visit the following link: http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/academ/staff/lowther.html