Weinreb received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1963. While he was still a graduate student at MIT, he developed the world’s first digital autocorrelation spectrometer which he then used to place a new upper limit to the Galactic deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio. With Barrett, Meeks, and Henry, he detected the hydroxyl molecule (OH); this was the first radio observation of an interstellar molecule. His autocorrelation spectrometer technique is now in use at virtually every major radio observatory throughout the world and has been crucial in the subsequent explosive growth of interstellar molecular spectroscopy.
In 1965 Weinreb went to the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia where he became Head of the Electronics Division and later Assistant Director of NRAO. During his 23 years at NRAO, he pioneered the use of low-noise, cryogenically cooled solid state amplifiers which greatly enhanced the sensitivity of radio telescopes. He was the architect for the electronic systems design for the NRAO Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico and led the group which developed the novel receivers and the data transmission, acquisition, and monitor and control systems for the VLA.
Subsequently, Weinreb worked firstly at Lockheed Martin Laboratories and then at the University of Massachusetts where he developed various millimetre wave devices. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia. Most recently he has been a Faculty Associate at Caltech and a Principal Scientist at JPL where he has continued his work on low noise amplifier devices. He played a leading role in the electronics design for a new Deep Space Network (DSN) space tracking array, and he has been active in developing wideband feeds and front ends as well as investigating cost effective designs for modest size antennas, all of which will be important for the next generation of radio telescopes such the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). In addition he has been working with the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT) program to develop a 34-metre radio telescope at Goldstone for use with schools around the globe.
‘For nearly five decades Sandy’s innovative contributions to radio astronomy have paved the way for an amazing array of new and exciting discoveries about the nature and evolution of the Universe’, said Dr David Jauncey of the Australia Telescope National Facility in Australia.
Professor Bardin received the BS degree in electrical engineering from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2003, the MS degree in electrical engineering from the University of California Los Angeles in 2005, and the PhD degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2009.
From 2003-2005, he was with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, where he was involved in the demonstration of an array-based downlink for the NASA deep-space network. From 2009-2010, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Caltech High-Speed Integrated Circuits group, where his research was focused on self-healing integrated circuits. In 2010, he joined the University of Amherst as an Assistant Professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His current research thrusts include reconfigurable millimeter-wave integrated circuits and built-in self-test, single photon detection, ultra-sensitive cryogenically cooled low-noise amplifiers, transistor modeling, THz integrated circuits, and novel applications of silicon integrated circuit technology for low-temperature scientific applications. Professor Bardin has served on the IEEE IMS Technical Program Review Committee since 2012 and was a recipient of a 2011 DARPA Young Faculty Award and a 2014 NSF CAREER Award.
Matt Morgan received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1999, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology in 2001 and 2003, respectively, where he conducted research in the development of Monolithic Millimeter-wave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) and MMIC-based receiver components for atmospheric radiometers and deep-space communications. He has authored over 40 papers and has two patents in the areas of MMIC design, millimeter-wave system integration, and high-frequency packaging techniques.
As a Scientist and Research Engineer at the NRAO Central Development Lab (CDL) in Charlottesville, VA, Matt is involved in the design and development of low-noise receivers, components, and novel concepts for radio astronomy instrumentation in the cm-wave, mm-wave, and submm-wave frequency ranges. He was Project Engineer for the K-Band Focal Plane Array on the Green Bank Telescope, and is currently the head of CDL’s Integrated Receiver Development Program.
Dr. Akgiray received the B.S. degree at Cornell University in 2005, the M.S. degree at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007, and the Ph.D. degree at California Institute of Technology in April 2013, all in Electrical Engineering. Prior to his Ph.D., he worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an RF/microwave engineer on two spaceflight missions: the Mars Science Laboratory and the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP). In Fall of 2013, Dr. Akgiray returned to his native Turkey and joined the Electrical-Electronics Engineering Department at Ozyegin University as an Assistant Professor.
Dr. Akgiray’s research interests lie broadly in microwave circuit and systems, RF/microwave integrated circuits, electromagnetics, antennas and remote sensing. The primary application of interest is remote sensing using active (radar) and passive (radiometer) microwave systems on ground-based, airborne and space-borne platforms. He is currently pursuing projects on ultra-wideband, very-low-noise, cryogenic amplifiers and ultra-wideband antennas. Dr. Akgiray received two awards while at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is the author of a 2011 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Symposium Student Paper Competition Honorable Mention paper, a co-author on two journal articles with Prize Paper awards, and the author of an invited paper at the 2013 European Conference on Antennas and Propagation.
Andrew W. Janzen received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from George Fox University in 2014. Currently, he is working toward a M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. His research interests include magnetic physics, analog and digital circuit design, fiber optics, and digital signal processing.
