Optical Waves and Laser Beams in the Irregular Atmosphere (PDF)

N. S. Kopeika was born in Baltimore in 1944. Raised in Philadelphia, he received BS, MS, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966, 1968, and 1972, respectively. He and his family moved to Israel, and he began his career at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1973. He chaired the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for two terms (1989-1993) and was named Reuven and Francis Feinberg Professor of Electro-optics in 1994. He was the first head of the Department of Electro-optical Engineering (2000-2005), which grants graduate degrees in electro-optical engineering. He has published more than 190 papers in international reviewed journals and well over 150 papers at various conferences. Recent research involves development of a novel inexpensive focal plane array camera for terahertz imaging. He is a fellow of SPIE. Other areas of research include interactions of electromagnetic waves with plasmas, the optogalvanic effect, environmental effects on optoelectronic devices, imaging system theory, propagation of light through the atmosphere, imaging through the atmosphere, image processing and restoration from blur, imaging in the presence of motion and vibration, lidar, target acquisition, and image quality in general. He is the author of the textbook "A System Engineering Approach to Imaging," published by SPIE Press (first printing 1998, second printing 2000), and is a topic editor for Marcel Dekker for atmospheric optics in their Encyclopedia of Optical Engineering