John McWhirter (mathematician)  John G. McWhirter FRS FREng FIMA FInstP FIEE FLSW is a British mathematician and engineer in the field of signal processing. John McWhirter attended Newry High School. He graduated in mathematics from Queen's University Belfast in 1970, and did his PhD there in 1973 on "The Virial Theorem in Collision Theory" under Benjamin Moiseiwitsch. He started working in the Signal Processing Group at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, Great Malvern, in the late 1970s, and has worked there for RSRE's successor organizations, currently QinetiQ. McWhirter left QinetiQ on 31 August 2007 to take up his current post as Distinguished Research Professor in Engineering at Cardiff University. His work has mainly been in military areas including radar, sonar and communications, recently branching into civil applications. A particular interest is "blind" signal detection in which one does not know whether a signal is present, or its nature. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) and in 2002/3 its president. He is also a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.