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Laser Radar: Progress and Opportunities in Active Electro-Optical Sensing (2014)

Chapter: Appendix A: Committee Biographies

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Laser Radar: Progress and Opportunities in Active Electro-Optical Sensing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18733.
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A

Committee Biographies

Paul McManamon, Chair, is technical director of the Ladar and Optical Communication Institute (LOCI) at the University of Dayton. He is owner of Exciting Technology LLC. Until May 2008 he was chief scientist for the Sensors Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Air Force Materiel Command, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. The Sensors Directorate consists of about 1,250 people responsible for developing new sensor technology for the Air Force. Dr McManamon was responsible for the technical portfolio of the Sensors Directorate, including radio-frequency (RF) sensors and countermeasures, electro-optical (EO) sensors and countermeasures, and automatic object recognition. He has developed multidiscriminate EO sensors, including multifunction laser radar, novel EO countermeasure systems, and optical phased-array beam steering. Dr. McManamon participated in three Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (AFSAB) summer studies: New World Vistas (1995); A Roadmap for a 21st Century Aerospace Force (1998); and Sensors for Difficult Targets (2001). He was instrumental in the development of laser flash imaging, initiating the ERASER program as a method to enhance EO target recognition range by a factor of 4 or 5. Dr. McManamon is widely recognized in the electro-optical community. He was the president of the International Society of Optics and Photonics (SPIE) in 2006 and is involved in numerous other scientific organizations.

Walter F. Buell, Vice Chair, is principal director of the Electronics and Photonics Laboratory at the Aerospace Corporation. Dr. Buell has been a part of the technical staff at Aerospace for many years. Previously, he has served as systems director for NGA InnoVision Programs, Systems Director for Advanced Studies, manager of the Lidar and Atomic Clocks Section of the Photonics Technology Department, as well as the principal investigator for Synthetic Aperture Ladar programs at Aerospace. Dr. Buell’s research interests also include laser cooling and trapping of atoms, atomic clocks, laser remote sensing, and quantum information physics. He has published more than 25 papers in atomic, molecular, and optical physics and holds 3 patents. Dr. Buell has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the American Physical Society (APS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and SPIE.

Melissa Goodhart Choi is the group leader of the Active Optical Systems Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Lincoln Laboratory. This group focuses on development of advanced laser radar concepts and is currently involved in the development and operation of experimental and deployed airborne and ground-based three-dimensional laser radars; data exploitation; and simulation and modeling efforts for various applications, with significant efforts in the area of coherent laser radar. She earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from North Carolina State University in 1999.

John Devitt is the director of engineering at Raytheon Vision Systems. He was the former division chief of the Electro-Optical Sciences Laboratory's remote sensing group at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). Previously he was manager of the Systems Analysis and Test group in the Infrared Products Engineering organization at L-3 Cincinnati Electronics (CE). He has more than 20 years’ experience in advanced technology projects in EO-IR, optics, sensors, and related areas, including direct experience in

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Laser Radar: Progress and Opportunities in Active Electro-Optical Sensing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18733.
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leading both large-format focal plane array (FPA) development and novel detector programs. He has led major research and development, manufacturing technology, and other advanced technology developmental projects with broad technical and economic scope at both L-3 CE and, previously, the GE Global Research Center. This has involved coordinating multiple cross-technical and organizational groups within businesses, managing university and national laboratory subcontracts, and being a key interface with the major government agencies. In 1993, Mr. Devitt was awarded the GE Sanford Moss Award for Most Outstanding Test and Measurement Program. He has 12 U.S. patents and numerous publications. Mr. Devitt is a certified Six Sigma Green Belt and has an M.S. in physics from Ohio State University.

Elsa Garmire (NAE) is Sydney E Junkins Professor of Engineering Sciences at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, where she served as dean of the Thayer School of Engineering from 1995 to 1997. Prior to that she was William Hogue Professor of Electrical Engineering, professor of physics, and director of the Center for Laser Studies at the University of Southern California, where she had been since 1975. She served on the research staff at Caltech for 9 years under the direction of Amnon Yariv. Dr. Garmire’s research has focused on lasers and optics, including opto-electronics, nonlinear optics, optical devices, fiber optics, quantum electronics, device fabrication, and semiconductors. She and her students have authored over 200 journal papers and received 10 patents. She has supervised 30 Ph.D. and 15 M.S. theses. The focus of this research has been to contribute both experimentally and theoretically to the understanding of nonlinear optics, integrated optics, and semiconductor lasers. Dr. Garmire has served the research community as a member of the boards of five professional societies and as president of the Optical Society of America. She has organized seven conferences related to her research interests and has been associate editor for four technical journals. In honor of her contributions to quantum electronics and nonlinear optics, Dr. Garmire has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was promoted to fellow of the IEEE, the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, and the Society of Women Engineers SWE). She received the SWE Achievement Award (its highest award), has been a Fulbright scholar, and was elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. Garmire has advised government policy makers by serving on numerous technical advisory boards, panels, and committees for the Army, the Department of Energy (DOE), the Air Force, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Research Council (NRC), and the NAE. She has also been involved in public policy through the public affairs committees of the APS and the American Institute of Physics, as well as on the NRC Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. In 2007 and 2008, Professor Garmire spent a year as a Jefferson Science Fellow at the U.S. State Department, advising in the area of telecommunications. She received an A.B. in physics from Harvard and a Ph.D. in physics from MIT under the direction of Nobel prize winner Charles H. Townes.

Gary W. Kamerman is the president and chief scientist for FastMetrix, Inc., where he has lead the science team that oversaw the design, development, and deployment of several advanced remote-sensing laser systems for the U.S. government. He supervised the design and demonstration of deployable high-performance computer systems, and designed nonintrusive optical instruments for high-speed velocimetry, interior ballistics analysis, remote chemical detection, and combustion diagnostics. Mr. Kamerman invented and patented the optical computing system to process laser radar signals before photodetection. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Kiev Polytechnic Institute, focusing his studies on applied physics.

Kenneth A. Kress is a senior scientist for KBK Consulting, Inc., an affiliate of Montana State University’s Department of Physics, and a consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton, where he specializes in quantum information science and other technical evaluations and strategic planning for intelligence and defense applications. Some of his past clients include DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, Noblis, (formerly known as Mitretek Systems), GTRI, and Lockheed Martin’s Special Programs Division. From 1971 to 1999 he worked in a series of positions at the Central Intelligence Agency’s

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Laser Radar: Progress and Opportunities in Active Electro-Optical Sensing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18733.
×

Directorate of Operations, Office of Development and Engineering, and, finally, its Office of Research and Development (ORD). He was first a research and development manager, later a program manager, and finally an ORD senior scientist responsible for management support, the development of technical and strategic plans, and DOD inter-agency coordination for advanced technology. He is the inventor of the solid-state neutron detector, for which he won an award in 1981. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Montana State University.

Jeanette Lurier is an engineering fellow at Raytheon Company. Ms. Lurier has over 30 years’ experience in aerospace engineering and system architecture and has been with Raytheon since 1985. She has spent most of her career working on active and passive EO/IR systems for space applications and developing new technologies in lasers and IR sensors. Ms. Lurier is a Raytheon Certified Architect and is currently managing the ladar product line of Raytheon Space Systems. In this role she focuses on developing strong customer relationships and leveraging her work as mission systems engineer to guide architecture studies, mission analysis, technology roadmap development, and technology development, paving the way for new business opportunities in cutting-edge capabilities. Ms. Lurier originally joined the company as an optical engineer and has worked on all aspects of program execution, including concept generation, hardware design, development, fabrication and test, system design integration and architecture, and technology development. Ms. Lurier holds a B.A. in physics from Cornell University and an M.S. in optical engineering from the University of Rochester.

Pradip Mitra is senior director of advanced development programs at DRS Technologies in Dallas, Texas, where he has worked for the past 10 years. He oversees multiple IR technology development programs, including active imaging detectors and sensors and dual-band FPA programs. At DRS, his group, which is involved in HgCdTe avalanche photodiode (APD) based detectors, has developed, among other things, the highest performing active-passive dual-mode infrared sensors, 3-D imaging FPAs and receivers, and single photon counting detectors. Before joining DRS he worked at Lockheed Martin for 13 years, where he was involved in IR materials and detector research. His contributions there were in the areas of MOCVD HgCdTe materials, two-color detectors and FPAs, and quantum well IR photodetectors (QWIPs). He developed the material structures for the first simultaneous dual-band detectors and FPAs and led the effort that produced the highest quantum efficiency QWIPs with a novel diffractive resonant optical coupling scheme. He is the recipient of an Individual Excellence Award from Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, and a Best Paper award from the MSS Detector Specialty Group Meeting in 2005 for his paper “Monolithic tunable Fabry Perot filter integrated with SWIR HgCdTe detector for hyperspectral detection.” He holds 18 issued patents in the IR technology area and has coauthored over 70 papers. He received a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Boston University and an M.Sc. from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India.

Peter F. Moulton (NAE) is a principal research scientist for Q-Peak, Inc. After finishing graduate school he was employed in the Quantum Electronics Group at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. In 1985 he joined a start-up company, Schwartz Electro-Optics (SEO), as vice president and managed the founding of the company's Research Division in Concord, Massachusetts. Dr. Moulton became senior vice president of SEO in 1997 and was involved in spinning off the Research Division as a separate company, Q-Peak, in 1998, and in the sale of Q-Peak to its current parent company, Physical Sciences Inc., in 2001. He served as the vice president and chief technology officer of Q-Peak until 2012, when he moved to a part-time position as a principal research scientist. Dr. Moulton's technical work began in the field of bulk solid state lasers and in recent years has extended to include nonlinear optics and fiber lasers. Dr. Moulton is a fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and of the IEEE. In 1997 he was awarded the R.W. Wood Prize from the OSA and the William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award from IEEE/LEOS, and in 2013 he won the IEEE Photonics Award. He was elected to the NAE in 2000. He received an A.B. in physics from Harvard College in 1968 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from MIT in 1972 and 1975.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Laser Radar: Progress and Opportunities in Active Electro-Optical Sensing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18733.
×

Jonathan Smith is the Olga and Alberico Pompa Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA. Before that, Dr. Smith was at Bell Telephone Laboratories and Bell Communications Research, which he joined at the AT&T divestiture. His current research interests include programmable network infrastructures, network defense, and cognitive radios. Dr. Smith served on the Network and Information Technology Technical Advisory Group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is an IEEE fellow, and is a member of the NRC Board on Army Science and Technology (BAST). He received his A.B. in mathematics magna cum laude from Boston College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Columbia University.

Abbie (Tippie) Watnik is a Karle Fellow and Research Physicist in the Applied Optics Branch within the Optical Sciences Division at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Dr. Watnik’s current work focuses on applying holographic and computational imaging techniques and principles to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems and countermeasures (CM) to support projects of interest for our national defense. Her research interests include active imaging, diffractive imaging, aberration correction, phase reconstruction, mathematical algorithm development, and nonconventional approaches to image correction. Dr. Watnik earned a Ph.D. and an M.S. from the University of Rochester. As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Harvey Fellow, Dr. Watnik studied aberration correction for multiplane aberrations using a nonlinear optimization approach that employs sharpness metrics as well as constructed and processed gigapixel synthetic-aperture high-resolution imagery. She is a recipient of the Rochester Precision Optics Award and winner of the Mark Ain Technical Business Model Competition and holds a Ph.D. in optics from the University of Rochester.

Eli Yablonovitch (NAS/NAE) is currently a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California (UC), Berkeley. He worked for 2 years at Bell Telephone Laboratories and then became a professor of applied physics at Harvard. In 1979 he joined Exxon to do research on photovoltaic solar energy. Then, in 1984, he joined Bell Communications Research, where he was a Distinguished Member of Staff, and also director of solid state physics research. In 1992 he joined UC, Los Angeles, where he was the Northrop Grumman Professor of Electrical Engineering. In 2007 Dr. Yablonovitch assumed his current position, where he is the James and Katherine Lau Chair in Engineering. Professor Yablonovitch's work has covered a broad variety of topics: nonlinear optics, laser-plasma interaction, infrared laser chemistry, photovoltaic energy conversion, strained-quantum-well lasers, and chemical modification of semiconductor surfaces. Currently his main interests are in opto-electronics, high-speed optical communications, high-efficiency light-emitting diodes and nanocavity lasers, photonic crystals at optical and microwave frequencies, and quantum computing and quantum communication. He received his Ph.D. degree in applied physics from Harvard University in 1972.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Laser Radar: Progress and Opportunities in Active Electro-Optical Sensing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18733.
×
Page 281
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Laser Radar: Progress and Opportunities in Active Electro-Optical Sensing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18733.
×
Page 282
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Laser Radar: Progress and Opportunities in Active Electro-Optical Sensing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18733.
×
Page 283
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Committee Biographies." National Research Council. 2014. Laser Radar: Progress and Opportunities in Active Electro-Optical Sensing. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18733.
×
Page 284
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In today's world, the range of technologies with the potential to threaten the security of U.S. military forces is extremely broad. These include developments in explosive materials, sensors, control systems, robotics, satellite systems, and computing power, to name just a few. Such technologies have not only enhanced the capabilities of U.S. military forces, but also offer enhanced offensive capabilities to potential adversaries - either directly through the development of more sophisticated weapons, or more indirectly through opportunities for interrupting the function of defensive U.S. military systems. Passive and active electro-optical (EO) sensing technologies are prime examples.

Laser Radar considers the potential of active EO technologies to create surprise; i.e., systems that use a source of visible or infrared light to interrogate a target in combination with sensitive detectors and processors to analyze the returned light. The addition of an interrogating light source to the system adds rich new phenomenologies that enable new capabilities to be explored. This report evaluates the fundamental, physical limits to active EO sensor technologies with potential military utility; identifies key technologies that may help overcome the impediments within a 5-10 year timeframe; considers the pros and cons of implementing each existing or emerging technology; and evaluates the potential uses of active EO sensing technologies, including 3D mapping and multi-discriminate laser radar technologies.

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