Search Site:

Areté Fellows

 

Dr. John Dugan received his Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, with a major in Hydrodynamics, from Northwestern University in 1967. He has held various positions at the Naval Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research and at Areté Associates, primarily as a Principal Investigator on basic and applied research projects in aircraft and spacecraft remote sensing, turbulence in the marine boundary layers, and wave physics of many types. Dr. Dugan is a specialist in experiment design, instrumentation development, and analysis of multi-dimensional data, particularly in respect to prototype development and testing. His most recent projects have involved time series imaging of the littorals for USN and USMC tactical missions in support of expeditionary warfare. He formed and leads the Field Measurements Group that provides ocean and aircraft related experiment design, instrumentation development, field support, data management and production of results for projects within and outside the company. Dr. Dugan has been the Senior Scientist or Test Director on a large number of experiments with multiple platforms, often including research vessels, satellites, aircraft, buoys, and coastal facilities.

Ms. Claudia Erland has a B.A. in Physics from Bridgewater State College, Massachusetts, and an M.A. in Physics from Wesleyan University. Her Master’s Thesis was entitled "Rayleigh-Bénard Convection in Liquid Helium 4." She has had a varied career, including working at the Office of the Scientific Advisor, Allied Forces Southern Italy, in Naples, Italy, and teaching physics and mathematics for the University of Maryland, University College, Asian Division, in Japan. Ms. Erland’s career includes 25 years in Naval Intelligence, where she began in the Acoustic Analysis Division, then working in almost all areas of Naval Intelligence, and eventually serving as the Executive Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence. During her career, she also worked as a detailee at the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center. She left Naval Intelligence in 2007 as the Deputy Director, which is the senior civilian position with oversight over all Naval Intelligence civilian personnel worldwide. Ms. Erland has received numerous awards including the Navy’s Superior Civilian Service Award and, in 2004, the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award. She has served on numerous advisory panels and is currently a member of the board of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. Ms. Erland is spearheading efforts to apply Areté’s expertise and capabilities to the needs of the National Security Community.

Dr. Charles Forsyth was educated at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his B.S. in Physics in 1977 and his Ph.D. in Physics in 1981. His doctoral thesis was entitled "A Quark Model of the Non-Strange Baryons," and his thesis work in theoretical particle physics was followed by three years in the experimental high-energy physics group at Carnegie Mellon. Since joining Areté Associates in 1981, Dr. Forsyth has pursued an eclectic set of research interests, ranging from in situ oceanographic measurements to remote sensing of the ocean and land using IR, radar, passive electro-optic cameras and active lidar systems. He has a core interest in studying physics-based phenomenology and converting that knowledge into algorithms for solving real-world problems. He currently leads the Special Projects Group in Arlington, Virginia.

Dr. Robert Lindgren attended the University of Minnesota as a Hertz Scholar majoring in Chemical Engineering. He received a Hertz Fellowship to continue his education at Caltech, where he received a Ph.D. in 1970 with a major in Chemical Engineering and a minor in Applied Mathematics. His thesis research focused on a theoretical analysis of the positive column of a gas discharge. His graduate research was followed by postdoctoral research in biomedical engineering. Prior to joining Areté Associates, Dr. Lindgren spent nine years at R & D Associates (RDA). While there, he investigated a wide range of nuclear effects and worked as an analyst on strategic weapons systems. His work included such topics as missile hardness criteria studies, SSBN security and counterforce effectiveness, ASW tactical engagement analysis, combustion phenomenology, atmospheric chemistry and IR radiation associated with nuclear bursts, and IR radiative transfer from jet plumes. Dr. Lindgren has been at Areté Associates since 1982. His primary focus has been the design and implementation of search, detect, track, and discrimination algorithms, and Dr. Lindgren has been the lead analyst for many algorithm development tasks. He frequently worked on tasks from concept design through coding implementation and performance evaluation. He has written numerous reports and has presented tutorial seminars on such topics as detection/tracking, mathematical theory of evidential reasoning, and neural nets. He has developed new tracking concepts and demonstrated their performance. In particular, his development of the basic Bayesian Field Tracking approach and its extension and specialization to particular applications have been documented through the presentation of a number of SPIE conference papers and an invited paper at the Tenth Meeting on Optical Engineering in Israel.

Dr. Mike Milder was one of the original four founders of Arete Associates in 1975, and he worked at the company for almost 35 years. Mike received his B.S. in Physics from Caltech and his Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University. His doctoral thesis was entitled "Rotating Stellar Systems." Dr. Milder had over 30 years of experience in modeling, processing, and interpreting space-time ocean surface and subsurface measurements. He served as the senior scientist in several successful efforts to bring together decision theory with actual physical measurements in detecting and classifying upper ocean phenomena. He devised architecture for high-throughput search-and-detect algorithms based on a generalized Neyman-Pearson test. Dr. Milder was the originator of the operator expansion method, a major modern advance in formulating and computing rough-surface scattering of acoustic and electromagnetic waves. He formulated and tested data-adaptive track-before-detect algorithms for barely observable targets, and he devised and installed efficient, nearly optimal editing/rejection algorithms for non-Gaussian noise bursts. Prior to joining Areté, Dr. Milder was the lead scientist for DARPA's OWEX program, responsible for quantitative assessment of remote detectability of internal-wave wakes generated by submerged submarines. Additionally, he conducted theoretical studies of formation mechanisms for surface, infrared submarine wake signatures.

Dr. Steven Ramberg has over 30 years of experience in conducting and managing naval R&D. He joined Areté in 2007 following a four-year appointment as the Director of the NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC) in LaSpezia, Italy, overseeing maritime, mostly undersea, research programs and advising NATO and its 26 member nations on research and technology strategies as well as coordination among national programs and transformation of NATO capabilities. He previously served at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) starting in 1988 as a Program Manger in ocean engineering and other S&T topics and then from 2001 to 2003 as Director and Chief Scientist. His tenure at ONR involved management of integrated programs in ocean, atmosphere and space S&T for the U.S. Navy, oversight of Navy-owned research vessels in the academic fleet, and the inauguration of the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) across 12 federal agencies. His earlier research at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) addressed fluid dynamics of bluff bodies, nonlinear ocean waves, stratified wakes, turbulence near a free surface and related remote sensing topics. This research was published in over 60 unclassified papers during his tenure at NRL.

Dr. Lawrence Thebaud grew up west of Chicago and received his B.S. in Physics from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where he graduated as salutatorian of his class. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard University in 1971, with a thesis in elementary particle theory. He performed postdoctoral research in particle theory and taught physics at Arizona State University, Florida State University and Penn State University, and his interests ranged from pure theory to phenomenology. At Areté since shortly after its inception in 1976, he switched to classical physics, conducting original research in modeling and signal processing related to remote sensing of the ocean. On the modeling side, he has dealt with subsurface and surface ocean dynamics and sensor responses, with applications to radar (including a concentration on SAR processing), passive visible and infrared optics, and subsurface lidar and sonar. A significant part of these efforts has been to model radar scattering and optical imaging for surfaces that are both rough and dynamic. On the detection theory side, he has acquired long experience in designing and optimizing algorithms to deal with small signals distributed over many degrees of freedom in a measurement. He was awarded a patent for the fingerprint detection algorithm that became the core technology for the Areté spin-off, Biometric Identification, Inc.