Eades received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from
Australian National University in 1974, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the same university in 1977 under the supervision of
Jennifer Seberry.[2] He then did postdoctoral studies at the
University of Waterloo before taking an academic position at the
University of Queensland, where he remained until 1991. He was a professor of computer science at the
University of Newcastle from 1992 to 1999, and joined the University of Sydney faculty in 2000. As well as his faculty position at Sydney, Eades was also a distinguished researcher at
NICTA.[3][4]
Eades is the co-author (with Giuseppe Di Battista,
Roberto Tamassia, and Ioannis G. Tollis) of the book Graph drawing: Algorithms for the visualization of graphs,[5] and of the associated survey "Algorithms for drawing graphs: an annotated bibliography".[6] He has also written many highly cited research papers in graph drawing, on topics including
spring algorithms,[7] performance speed up with
N-body methods,[8] maintenance of the "mental map" in dynamically changing drawings,[9] heuristics for reducing the
number of edge crossings in
layered graph drawings,[10] and visual display of
clustering information in graphs.[11] He was the keynote speaker at the 12th IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization in 2006,[4] was one of three invited speakers at the 19th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation in 2008,[12] and was one of two invited speakers at the 18th
International Symposium on Graph Drawing in 2010.[13]
He has been the
doctoral advisor of over 30 graduate students.[3]