Dr Toby Boyson

Dr Toby Boyson is an education focussed Senior Lecturer in electrical engineering at the School of Engineering and Information Technology at UNSW Canberra. 

Dr Boyson currently spends most of his time teaching and supporting students. He is teaching or has previously taught all of the analog circuits and practical engineering classes in the EE degree.  Dr Boyson is interested in all aspects of engineering education: he is particularly interested in the links between the affective and cognitive development of engineering students, problem solving and practical lab skills through the lens of cognitive load theory, engineering writing, and in increasing and maintaining the representation of women in engineering degrees.  He was previously co-chair of YoWIE, an outreach to encourage young women to consider studying engineering.  Dr Boyson set up and manages the Protolab, UNSW Canberra's makerspace . Dr Boyson is passionate about building and maintaining an inclusive environment, particularly for neurodivergent students, for which he was awarded a 2022 UNSW Students’ Choice Teaching Award.

In his time as a researcher, Dr Boyson has designed and built optoelectronic instrumentation to measure explosives and chemical warfare agents, to characterise hypersonic flows, and to validate new control algorithms. Instrumentation and signal processing techniques he helped develop have been a finalists at the UNSW Innovation awards (2012), and the Australian Museum Eureka Prize (2015). He holds several patents and patent applications in signal processing and spectroscopic instrumentation that are being developed for commercialisation in the USA and has additionally invented methods to desalinate water and to degrade "biodegradable" plastics.