496 Chapter 15 MATLAB
Steve Chapman
Engineering has been an interesting and
exciting career for me. I have worked in
many different areas during my life, but
they have all taken advantage of the com-
mon problem-solving skills that I learned
as an engineering student and have applied
to solving life’s problem since.
I graduated in Electrical Engineering from Loui-
siana State University in 1975, and then served as an
officer in the U.S. Navy for 4 years. The Navy got me
out of Louisiana and gave me a chance to see the coun-
try for the first time, since I was posted to Mare Island,
CA and Orlando, FL. I used one aspect of my engi-
neering skill in this job, because I served primarily as an
instructor in Electrical Engineering at the U.S. Navy
Nuclear Power Schools.
The next major episode in my career was serving as
an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston Col-
lege of Technology, while simultaneously studying dig-
ital signal processing at Rice University. The academic
life was very different, but it also utilized the basic en-
gineering skills that I learned as an undergraduate.
Next, I moved to the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA.
There I became a radar researcher, applying the signal-
processing skills picked up at Rice University to the de-
velopment of new radar systems and algorithms. For
nine years of this time, my family and I got to live on
Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands,working with first-rate radars used to track ICBM tests,
new satellite launches, and so forth. It was a great life in
a tropical paradise; we biked down to the airport every
morning and flew to work!
I also spent three years doing seismic signal pro-
cessing research at Shell Oil Company in Houston, TX.
Here I turned the same engineering and signal-process-
ing skills to a totally different domain —finding oil.
This job was exciting in a very different way than the
work for MIT, but equally satisfying.
In 1995, my family and I immigrated to Australia,
and we now live in Melbourne. I work for BAE SYS-
TEMS Australia, designing software programs that
model the defense of naval ships or taskgroups against
attacking aircraft and missiles. This work takes me
around the world to navies and research labs in more
than a dozen countries. It builds on all the disparate
components of my earlier career: naval experience,
radar, signal processing, missiles, and so forth. It is very
exciting and challenging, and yet I am building on
exactly the same skills I began learning at LSU so
long ago.
Add in a few odds and ends along the way (such as
textbook writing on electrical machinery, MATLAB,
Fortran, Java, etc.), and I have had as fun, diverse, and
exciting a career as anyone could ask. We have seen the
United States and the world along the way. My employ-
ers have paid me a good salary to go to work each day and
have fun. What more could you ask for in a career?Professional Profile
Source:Steve Chapman
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