Dr. R. Keith Raney
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
"While a teaching assistant at Purdue during my master’s degree years, I was told by an apparently inspired student that the class in question — EM theory— ‘might be useful some time.’ I have found in my career that even such unpopular required classes turn out to be useful, even essential, although not necessarily immediately."
Dr. R. Keith Raney has parlayed degrees from Harvard (BS ’60), Purdue (MSEE ’62) and Michigan (PhD ’68) into an “out-of-this-world” career. Since 1994, he has worked in the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University’s Space Department. He is responsible for earth-observation systems development, space-based radar conceptual design and radar-system analysis.
While with the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (1976-1994), Dr. Raney was the scientific authority for the world’s first digital processor for the SeaSat synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and was responsible for the conceptual design of the Radarsat-1 SAR. He contributed to the designs of NASA’s Venus radars Pioneer and Magellan, the ERS-1 microwave AMI instrument of the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA’s Shuttle Imaging Radar SIR-C. ESA’s CryoSat radar altimeter design is based on his original concept, and he was the design architect for the Mini-RF hybrid-polarimetric radars on India’s Chandrayaan-1 and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Dr. Raney holds U.S. and international patents on various aspects of radar, including the chirp scaling SAR processing algorithm, hybrid-polarimetric SAR architecture and on-board processing for the delay-Doppler altimeter. He has been a lecturer and workshop leader for remote-sensing training programs throughout the world for the United Nations, NATO, the European Space Agency and other international organizations. He has more than 400 major presentations and significant publications and served on advisory committees for the Office of Naval Research, the National Academy of Sciences and Germany’s Helmholtz Society, among others.
Dr. Raney is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Electromagnetics Academy and an Associate Fellow of the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute. He has also received numerous awards.
While with the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (1976-1994), Dr. Raney was the scientific authority for the world’s first digital processor for the SeaSat synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and was responsible for the conceptual design of the Radarsat-1 SAR. He contributed to the designs of NASA’s Venus radars Pioneer and Magellan, the ERS-1 microwave AMI instrument of the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA’s Shuttle Imaging Radar SIR-C. ESA’s CryoSat radar altimeter design is based on his original concept, and he was the design architect for the Mini-RF hybrid-polarimetric radars on India’s Chandrayaan-1 and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Dr. Raney holds U.S. and international patents on various aspects of radar, including the chirp scaling SAR processing algorithm, hybrid-polarimetric SAR architecture and on-board processing for the delay-Doppler altimeter. He has been a lecturer and workshop leader for remote-sensing training programs throughout the world for the United Nations, NATO, the European Space Agency and other international organizations. He has more than 400 major presentations and significant publications and served on advisory committees for the Office of Naval Research, the National Academy of Sciences and Germany’s Helmholtz Society, among others.
Dr. Raney is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Electromagnetics Academy and an Associate Fellow of the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute. He has also received numerous awards.