Professor John McCanny is an international authority on special purpose silicon architectures for Signal and Video Processing and for Cryptography. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers IEEE. His honours and awards include a UK Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal 1996, an IEEE Millennium Medal, the Royal Dublin Society/Irish Times Boyle medal 2004, the IETs Faraday medal 2006 - its highest honour and the Royal Irish Academys Cunningham medal 2011 - its highest honour. He was awarded a CBE in 2002.

He has co-founded two successful high technology companies based the work of his research teams, Amphion Semiconductor Ltd. and Audio Processing Technology Ltd. He was responsible within Queens University for developing the vision that led to the creation of the Northern Ireland Science Park 120 companies employing over 2100 people and its 37M research flagship, the Institute of Electronics Communications and Information Technology - ECIT www.ecit.qub.ac.uk .

He also led the initiative that created the 30M UK Centre for Secure Information Technology CSIT www.csit.qub.ac.uk . CSIT now has over 80 people working in the field of Cyber Security and related technologies and is an EPSRC/TSB/INI funded Innovation and Knowledge Centre based at ECIT.

He currently chairs the Royal Societys Policy Steering Committee on Cyber Security research and is currently a member of the board of UK Cyber Security Growth Partnership.