HRL Laboratories Applauds Staff Members Honored by National Academy of Engineering

HRL Laboratories, LLC is pleased to announce that staff members Dr. Andrea Corrion and Dr. Kevin Geary have been invited to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) highly selective symposium, U.S. Frontiers of Engineering. According to the NAE, Corrion and Geary are among the nation’s brightest young engineers, 89 of whom will attend the symposium to discuss advances in four fields: optical and mechanical materials, natural disaster forecasting, cybersecurity, and the hunt for earth-like exoplanets.

Andrea Corrion, MEL. © 2016 HRL Laboratories.

Corrion, an HRL Laboratories research scientist who received her doctorate in Materials Science in 2008 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, works in wide bandgap semiconductor materials and devices. Corrion says she was honored to be chosen to participate in the symposium. “It’s rare to have the opportunity to interact with engineers performing leading edge research outside of one’s own discipline,” she says. “I’m excited to meet a diverse array of engineers and scientists working both in industry and academia.”

Geary, who manages HRL Laboratories’ Apertures Department in Applied Electromagnetics, received his doctorate in Electrical Engineering in
2006 from the University of California, Los Angeles. He notes that many of his research group’s innovations result from cross-discipline based problem solving. “I hope to better understand the latest research advances in each of the symposium session topics and to establish collaborations with subject domain experts who are uniquely suited to solving our customers’ future electromagnetics challenges,” Geary says.

Kevin Geary, AEL. © 2016 HRL Laboratories.

At the same time, Geary is eager to share with attendees the lessons he learned while proposing and managing recent projects that benefited from daily interactions of material scientists, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, optical engineers, and computer scientists. “I am convinced that the leap-ahead advances we achieved simply could not have occurred without the close interaction of experts spanning so many fields of expertise,” he says.

Geary notes that the culture at HRL Laboratories lends itself to the cutting-edge strides and cross-disciplinary approaches promoted by U.S. Frontiers of Engineering. “Our department includes experts in reconfigurable antennas, wireless communications, computational EM, flexible and transparent electronics, artificial impedance surfaces, metamaterials, plasmas, non-Foster and microwave circuits, imaging, radar, lidar, RF-photonics, and chip-scale heterogeneously integrated photonics,” he says. “Our active project portfolio spans the EM spectrum from DC to UV light, and nearly all projects benefit from the support of at least one additional division at HRL.” Geary hopes to share the benefits of HRL Laboratories’ practices with symposium attendees.

Corrion, who in the past year managed the DARPA Microscale Power Conversion program, which involved high-frequency low-loss GaN power switch devices, and who is currently working on DARPA LUSTER, a program for high-efficiency UV lasers, says that she is excited both about session topics that fall outside of her area of expertise and about the conference framework. “The small size of the symposium makes it ideal for networking and getting to know new people,” she says.

Corrion and Geary will attend the symposium September 9-11, 2015, in Irvine, Calif.

HRL Laboratories, LLC, Malibu, California (hrl.com) is a corporate research-and-development laboratory owned by The Boeing Company and General Motors specializing in research into sensors and materials, information and systems sciences, applied electromagnetics, and microelectronics. HRL provides custom research and development and performs additional R&D contract services for its LLC member companies, the U.S. government, and other commercial companies.

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