Dr. Carl F. Schueler

Following B.S. and M.S. degrees in Astronomy & Physics at Louisiana State University, Carl directed Troy State University’s W.A. Gayle Planetarium and taught electronics for Hughes Aircraft Company. He then taught Physics at Santa Barbara City College from 1976 to 1980 while earning M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) as a Howard Hughes Doctoral Fellow.

 

While at Hughes Santa Barbara Research Center leading advanced Landsat imager design, he taught ECE at UCSB from 1980-1991, developing UCSB's graduate Electro-Optics (EO) program.*  He developed and led an internationally recognized one-week Landsat design and applications workshop for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Based on his leadership of NASA's Advanced Land Imager design, he developed a 1998 workshop for the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan from which Fundamentals of Imaging was derived. 

 

Carl led NASA’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) and Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor to successful (rated 'blue:' top NASA rating) critical design reviews (CDR). Based on pioneering work in the mid-‘90’s with NASA, he led the technical proposal for the stunningly successful 2008-2013 US Air Force Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload (CHIRP) staring missile warning experiment from geosynchronous earth orbit. He was CHIRP Chief Scientist through adoption of Hosted Payload Solutions (HoPS) program developed in 2014 by the Air Force and NASA based on CHIRP.

 

In 2015, he specified calibration and test equipment for Cloudland Instruments' HawkEye ocean-color sensor launched November 2018, producing excellent image quality. Since 2016, Carl has supported Magna's automotive thermal vision product line. From 2018 to 2021, Carl led test equipment design for automotive Lidar, inventing methods to dramatically reduce testing costs. In 2021, Carl was hired by MEI Technologies to help design a Low Earth Orbit Space Debris detection system. He’s authored or co-authored over 100 book chapters and papers on sensor design.

 

*“I took Carl’s 1983 graduate EO/IR Sensor Design course at UCSB. The content and depth were ideally suited to my EO/IR system engineering needs. Carl created a sound and accessible presentation to the many complex facets of the discipline that I have successfully used over my entire career. I recommend Carl’s course to any time-challenged EO/IR System IPT member needing to understand the concepts and/or calculations around the performance and design of these systems."

– Steve Botts, Deputy Chief Engineer, Technical Fellow, Raytheon Vision Systems, Goleta CA