Lou Pivato – Head of Engineering, Land and Integrated Systems Business Unit, BAE Systems Australia

Lou Pivato was born in Adelaide, received his secondary education at St Michael’s College and graduated with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Science (Mathematics) from the University of Adelaide in 1981.

Lou’s professional career has been in defence engineering, largely in the fields of electronic design, real time software development, training and simulation systems and engineering management.

Lou initially joined, what was then British Aerospace Australia, as a design engineer aiding the development of a metal fatigue monitoring system. In the mid-1980’s he spent 2 years seconded into McDonnell Douglas in St Louis, Missouri USA, developing fault diagnostic software for various FA-18A avionic systems. In 1989 he spent several months with McDonald Detwiller in Vancouver Canada as a member of the system engineering team specifying an array processor for the ESA ERS-1 satellite Synthetic Aperture Radar. He returned to Adelaide and participated in the development and eventual delivery of the system. Throughout the 1990’s Lou held various senior engineering roles in projects across various domains including thermal imaging, command team training and navigation training simulators.

In 2001, following the merger of GEC Marconi Systems and British Aerospace and the resultant formation of BAE Systems, Lou was appointed into his first business unit engineering management role. Currently Lou is the functional manager of approximately 600 engineers and para-professionals for BAE System’s Joint Business Unit.

Lou has been an alternate director of the Electronics Industry Association (EIA) for the past 18 months.