Led by Robert T. Pack, and principal investigators Paul Israelsen, Gail Bingham, and Tom Wilkerson, the Active Sensors Team includes USU faculty, MS and PhD students, and managers, cost analysts, and consultants from SDL.

Robert T. Pack, Active Sensors Team Lead, is a Research Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at USU. He specializes in geological and geomatics engineering.

He is the Director of the Center for Advanced Imaging LADAR (CAIL) and conducts research in LIDAR/LADAR systems and phenomenology, GPS/INS navigation systems, terrain surface topology and steep slope processes such as rock fall and landslides. His expertise includes remote sensing, photogrammetry, geographic information systems, optoelectronics, LIDAR sensor systems engineering, navigation systems engineering, geotechnical engineering, highway engineering, engineering geology, and survey engineering.
http://www.engineering.usu.edu/cee/faculty/BobPack.html

Gail Bingham, Principal Investigator, is the Chief Scientist for SDL. He is also a Research Professor in the Department of Plants, Soils, and Biometeorology at USU.

He has been an active member of the microgravity research community since 1990, participating in plant growth experiments on the Mir Space Station and the ISS. He has extensive experience as the PI of other NASA and DoD programs, including the Far-IR Spectroscopy of the Troposphere (FIRST) instrument and the Geostationary Imaging Fourier Transform Spectrometer (GIFTS) instrument, a NASA New Millennium EO 3 Mission and technology demonstrator for the next generation GOES IR Imager and Sounder. He is also a member of the Intergovernment Studies Team for the NPOESS Crosstrack Infrared Sounder (CrIS), the next generation IR sounder for the US operational polar orbiting spacecraft.

Paul Israelsen, Principal Investigator, is a Research Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at USU. He teaches courses in VLSI design and microelectronics. He started the VLSI design program at USU. Additionally, he is active in several research programs within the University which have as a goal the commercialization of technology and reducing theoretical research to practice. He served as Chief Technical Officer of a company he was instrumental in founding from research developed at the university. His research interests are in the areas of VLSI design, digital and analog integrated circuits, image compression and signal processing, and imaging. He has a number of publications and several patents in these areas.

http://www.engineering.usu.edu/ece/documents/resumes/paul_israelsen.pdf

Tom Wilkerson, Principal Investigator, is a senior scientist at SDL.His principle scientific interests include optical remote sensing of atmospheric conditions and constituents, quantitative spectroscopy of atmospheric molecules, new LIDAR technologies, simulations, measurements, and calibrations, and applications of holography to LIDAR and hyperspectral imaging. He holds 3 US patents, and has over 45 years of experience in the training of undergraduate and graduate students in basic and applied research. Wilkerson and colleagues have carried out new spectroscopy on near-IR water vapor and oxygen lines for applications to optical remote sensing. He was an original developer of water vapor profiling with tunable, near-IR dye lasers and differential absorption LIDAR (DIAL). Dr. Wilkerson has participated in the development and demonstration of new holographic LIDAR techniques, for application to three-dimensional, time-dependent remote sensing of the atmosphere using lasers.

Allen Q. Howard, Jr., Principal Investigator, is a Research Professor in Department of Physics at USU. He also is a member of the technical staff at Dugway Proving Ground (DPG), where he manages a DPG-USU student co-op program. His research interests include optical remote sensing, geophysical applications of electromagnetic theory, applied mathematics, and signal processing. This work resulted in many technical publications and presentations, two U.S. patents, and the award of IEEE Fellow. More recently, he has worked on optical methods to retrieve aerosol properties from active and passive sensors in the lower atmosphere.  

Mr. Howard has served as professor of geophysics at the Universidade do Pará and the Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense, both in Brazil. He also taught in the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Arizona and more recently in the Physics Department at Utah State University. In 1995, he founded Terragraf, a high-resolution subsurface imaging company. Mr. Howard has done extensive consulting; the organizations for which he has consulted include: Standard Oil, British Petroleum, Los Alamos Labs, and the U.S. Department of Commerce.