Jeff Collins (22 April 1930 – 23 September 2015) was a British electrical engineer who directed and researched experimental physics, robotics, microelectronics, communications technologies and parallel computing.

[1] Moving between academia, commercial and military research throughout his diverse career,[2][3] he proved to be an enthusiastic leader demonstrated in his numerous directorships, successful fund-raising and his recreational interests of sports.

From 1951 to 1956 he gained experience in microwave tubes and ferrite parametric amplifiers during employment at General Electric Company, Wembley and at Ferranti, Edinburgh.

Here he was introduced to signal processing capabilities of surface acoustic wave devices, magnetic garnet delay lines for correlation and pulse compression applications.

Collins was an innovator in 1969 when he, with Ted Paige and Dennis Maines from RSRE persuaded the IEE Electronics Division to underwrite the first International Specialist Seminar on surface acoustic wave devices held in Aviemore, to expand interest in this new technology in the UK and beyond.

In 1970, Collins was recruited back to the UK to join the University of Edinburgh to take up a SRC sponsored position as a research Professor, later converted to a personal chair in Industrial Electronics.

Following the Aviemore seminars SAW became a UK major R&D activity at this time with companion investigations by Charles Sandbank (Standard Telecommunication Laboratories), Cyril Brown (General Electric Company), John Palfreeman (Philips), Ted Paige and Denis Maines (RSRE Malvern) and Eric Ash (University College London).

Much of this research was based on spectrum analysis [12] for identifying or acquiring signals, with Collins publishing several papers in the early 1980s on Electronic Support Measures [13].

As Head of the Electrical Engineering Department from 1977 to 1984 Collins also served as the Chairman of the Wolfson Microelectronics Institute (WMI), advising on technology transfer.

Collins also encouraged and assisted Stephen Salter and Win Rampen to form the Edinburgh digital hydraulics spin-out company Artemis Intelligent Power, who secured the 2015 McRobert Award.