GRSS President 1988-1989
Dr. R. Keith Raney (Harvard, BS 1960; Purdue, MSEE 1962; Michigan, PhD 1968) has been with the Space Department of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory since August 1994, with responsibilities 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 scientific authority for the world’s first digital processor for the SeaSat synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and responsible for the conceptual design of the RADARSAT 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 the 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 US 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 in the United States, Brazil, Ecuador, Turkey, Mexico, and Spain, for the United Nations, NATO, the European Space Agency, and other international organizations. Dr. Raney was for two years the technical delegate from Canada to the Space Conference of the Americas. He served three years on the Committee on Earth Studies of the NRC, and was a member of the Science Council of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. He has over 400 major presentations and significant publications, including “Space-Based Remote Sensing Radars,” Chapter 18 in The Radar Handbook, 3rd Edition, M. Skolnik, Ed.: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Review and advisory committee service includes the Office of Naval Research, the National Academy of Sciences, the European Space Agency, Germany’s Helmholtz Society, the Danish Technical Research Council, and ONERA (France).
Dr. Raney served on the GRSS AdCom for 8 years (1984-1992) and was President for two terms (1988, 1989). He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Electromagnetics Academy, and an Associate Fellow of CASI. Honors include the IEEE GRSS 1990 Outstanding Service Award, the1993 Distinguished Achievement Award, and the1998 Transactions Prize Paper Award, the 1999 Gold Medal from the Canadian Remote Sensing Society, the IEEE Millennium Medal 2000, and the IEEE 2007 Dennis J. Picard Medal for radar technologies and applications. (Date: Jan. 2011)
