View of Ridgecrest/China Lake area from the top of Owens Peak
I grew up in California’s northern Mojave desert at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, enjoying all of the hiking, skiing, and backpacking that these mountains had to offer. My desire to be close to the Sierra Nevada was certainly one of many reasons that I chose to attend the University of California at Davis, receiving a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1985. I then worked as a design engineer for what was then called the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, CA for 4 years, designing, fabricating, and testing prototype electronics for the Laser Guided Training Round. In 1989 I enrolled in the graduate program at the University of California, Santa Barbara with the help of an educational fellowship provided by the Department of Defense. My original intention was simply to get a Masters degree, but at the encouragement of my graduate advisor, Professor Sanjit Mitra, I decided to stay on and pursue my PhD.
After receiving my PhD in 1993, I returned to China Lake and moved into the research department. During this time, my research focus was on applications of wavelets to practical problems of interest to the Navy, in particularly image and video compression. I left China Lake in 2000 to join the faculty in the Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Mexico State University. Since coming here, I have continued to study issues related to signal compression such as information extraction from compressed bit streams and the design of efficient, perceptually scalable audio coders. My current research interests include distributed audio and video coding, polarimetric image processing, and audio quality analysis.
I have a wonderful wife, Kim, who is also a professor at NMSU, and a beautiful 4 1/2 year old daughter Kate.