On the 25th of this month (February 2011) I will have completed 31 years working for the Department of the Army. I have been honored to participate in providing, hands down, the best sensor technologies in the world to support our Soldiers, Marines, Sailors and Airmen. I graduated in the last class from Madison College in May of 1977, just before the name change to James Madison University, with a double major in physics and mathematics and went on to earn an M.S. degree in physics from the College of William and Mary in 1979. Since that time I have worked for elements of the US Army Material Command in R&D and have managed a variety of projects.
My physics academic background and hands-on experience in the early days of the Plasma Physics laboratory at JMU prepared me for the challenges of working with real-world sensors and systems. My greatest inspiration was my faculty adviser, Prof. John Gordon. I still remember his coming into a general physics class one day, where I was in the first row, with a double-block and tackle and dumping it on the front table. When we asked why (as we had finished studying levers and pulleys) he remarked, "Oh this? This is what I had to use to pull up the 'curve' for the last quiz!"
In my time at JMU, I was a charter member of the first "Physics Society" (in-house predecessor of SPS), participated in the first soft-ball games (and keg party) against Chemistry and was the stand-in for Dr. Robert Kribel (Department Chairman) for the electrostatics-electrodynamics portion of the "Physics-is-Phun" show.
