Bruce Lusignan
American engineer (born 1936)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bruce Lusignan (born 1936)[1] is an emeritus[2][3] professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University[4][5] and a visiting professor at Portland State University.[6] He earned his B.S.E.E ('58), M.S.E.E. ('59) and Ph.D. ('63) degrees from Stanford.[6] In the early 1960s, he worked in radio astronomy at Stanford.[7][8] He has been director of Stanford's Communication Satellite Planning Center[9][10] and Stanford's Center for International Cooperation in Space.[5] He has also owned a small company designing cellular phones and pagers.[11]
His areas of specialization are communications satellites, telephone switches, cellular networks and the related signal processing problems.[6] He is inventor or co-inventor on 16 patents, including devices for metering power,[12] RF signal reception,[13] satellite transceivers,[14] alarm systems for cellular base stations,[15] tone generators for telephony,[16] and VSAT terminals.[17]
He has worked on designs for reusable launch vehicles[9] based on the Black Horse concept.[18] and has helped direct planning efforts for international cooperation on Mars exploration with the then-Soviet Union.[4][19][20][21] He led later post-Soviet cooperation in planning for an international Mars mission that included a space logistics function for ICBMs: using missiles such as the SS-18 to pre-position fuel and other supplies in Earth orbit, and Russia's Energia booster to send the supplies to Mars ahead of the crew.[22]
Lusignan also takes a strong interest in the politics and issues that arise in economic development,[6] including sustainable development in Africa,[10] earthquake relief and reconstruction in Peru,[23] and rural telecommunications in the Middle East.[24] For a number of years he ran EDGE – "Ethics of Development in a Global Environment"[25] – a weekly seminar at Stanford about issues in international conflict, trade, environmental sustainability, and amelioration of poverty and racism.[2][5]
In 1982, he was one of a number of professors who, with the support of their institutions, openly defied restrictions on use of otherwise-publicly available materials rationalized via the Arms Export Control Act.[26]