Since graduating from the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, Damien Watkins’ career has taken him around the world - literally. Damien completed his undergraduate degree (as a mature-age student), Honours and PhD at Monash. His PhD in the area of “distributed component architectures that provide language interoperability ” has been the basis of his research and work-life ever since.

For the last three years Damien has worked for Microsoft Research, Cambridge (MSRC) UK. He was a member of the External Research Office, whose goal is to extend the research scope of MSRC outside of the traditional computer science domain. Damien has recently moved to Redmond and now works on the Visual C++ team. Damien’s involvement with Microsoft Research started while at Monash, working on the development of the .NET Framework during his PhD. This led to his first book, "Programming in the .NET Environment" (co-authored with Mark Hammond and Brad Abrams), describing the architecture and goals of the .NET Framework.

While completing his postgraduate studies, Damien lectured in a number of subjects at Monash including Distributed Object Technologies, Software Component Technologies, Unix System Call Programming and Application Programming with C++. He also lectured for a semester at Uppsala University in Sweden and King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology in Thailand.

“My time at Monash not only provided me with a great education but also gave me the links to leading international researchers, and I have never looked back from there.”

Other profiles

Undergraduates:

Postgraduates: