Greg Coxson

Background

About Greg Coxson

My first job after graduate school was at Hughes Radar Systems in California. I helped debug the radar control software for the F15 and improved calibrations for the B2 bomber radar. Since then, I have worked at Lockheed Martin MS2, Technology Service Corporation and the Radar Division of the Naval Research Lab, the United States Patent Office, and the United States Naval Academy. While Radar is a common thread through most of these jobs, it does not tell the whole story, because radar engineering is so rich and varied. For instance, I have designed discriminators for Ballistic Missile Defense, designed a tracker for a bistatic radar, and developed sets of low-sidelobe binary pulse compression codes. Throughout, it has been a source of pride to know that I am helping support the U.S. military and am helping support innovation. I have been fortunate to work closely with several brilliant engineers and mathematicians in developing efficient exhaustive search algorithms for binary and polyphase codes with low autocorrelation sidelobes. In the last couple of years I have been interested in complementary code sets, that is, sets of codes whose autocorrelations sum to give zero sidelobes. Matrices whose columns are the codes in a complementary set are called complementary code matrices; these include the famous and fascinating Hadamard matrices. Recently, I have become interested in approaches to mitigate the Doppler sensitivity for which complementary-coded waveforms are known. I have also had the remarkable opportunity to develop a graduate-level course in Radar Signals for the University of Maryland. The course led to the discovery of some open questions that I initially posed to the students as thinking exercises, but none of us could resolve them. Although the course was about radar signals, many of the codes and waveforms are also useful in communications (or medical imaging, remote sensing, and other applications).