Professor Abdalla is currently the head of Department of Design
Management and communication. He is the winner of the IMS Medal for
Innovation in Design for Manufacturing for the 21st century from
the Centre for Intelligent Manufacture which operates under the
auspices of the Japanese Government, Professor Abdalla has
extensive expertise in a number of inter-related subject areas,
including responsive manufacturing, design for automation, agile
organisations, and global concurrent engineering. Professor
Abdalla is the founder of the Product Development and Concurrent
Engineering research group at De Montfort University, which has a
high reputation, both on a national and international level. It
has links with British Telecom, Ericsson Mobile Communication Ltd.,
SIPA Group, Unipart, BICC, Cranfield University, UMIST, the
Fraunhofer Institute, the University of Central Florida, the
University of Tokyo, the Kajima Corporation and Nissan Motors.
For a number of years, Professor Abdalla worked in industry before joining academia.
He is author and co-author of more than 80
research papers published in international journals and refereed
conferences. He has been invited as keynote speaker to several
conferences and currently serves on the technical reviewing
committee of a number of journals. Professor Abdalla has
experience in managing multi-national projects and was the
European Consortium technical manager of both projects the
IMS-test Case 3, "Concurrent Engineering for Global Manufacturing"
and the Autonomous and Metamorphic Manufacturing Systems for the
21st century. He is also involved in consultancy and joint
projects with leading orgasnisations in the United Kingdom and
overseas. He is at present writing two books and serving on the
international technical committee of several international
journals and conferences.