I just received the Fall Newsletter and decided to respond to the "News from Alumni" request. I came to the Department in January 1977 and graduated with M.S in the summer of 1978. Stan Lieber was my advisor. I was offered a research position while still at SIU at Holcomb Research Institute, Butler University in Indiana. I did my thesis work at Butler which was on non-point sources of water pollution in a eight county area in Indiana. I believe I was the first student at SIU to use satellite remote sensing data and a Geographic Information System for spatial modeling.

There was a bit of apprehension by my thesis advisory team mainly because this work was so new to SIU. However I prevailed and graduated and was immediately offered a research position at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland where I work to this day. My first five years at Goddard was teaching remote sensing and GIS to a variety of participants include many post docs from around the Country. Since then I have focused my research on the design of large, complex scientific database systems and spatial data structures, again satellite data being a large driver.

I am currently the Head of the Applied Information Sciences Branch at Goddard whose's focus is on of all things optical computational physics (don't ask), advanced satellite ground systems and applied computer science research. I have been by request a member of a committee in the Ñational Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation, the Mayo Clinic,and the Smithsonian here in Washington, D.C. Have given well over one hundred professional talks at various universities and other organizations including by invitation by the President of SIU in 1990. I have over seventy publications including referred journals, chapters in books including a very popular on line remote sensing tutorial and have given interviews to the British Broadcast Corporation and the New York Times.

I live with my wife of twenty six years in the horse countryside near Davidsonville, Maryland, ride Harley Davidson motorcycles, a fan of good wine and food and play a reasonable game of racquetball where cheating on the score is my specialty (sic).