2019 IEEE OES Emeritus Award

James Lynch is presented the Emeritus Award for his outstanding service to the Society as elected member of Executive Committees as Editor-in-Chief (1999-2004) of the OES Journal.
Dr. James Lynch obtained his B.S. in Physics from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1972 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1978. He then worked for three years at the Applied Research Laboratories of the University of Texas at Austin (ARL/UT) from 1978 to 1981, after which he joined the scientific staff at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). He worked at WHOI until his retirement in 2017, and currently holds the position of Senior Scientist Emeritus. His research specialty areas are ocean acoustics and acoustical oceanography. He also greatly enjoys occasional forays into physical oceanography, marine geology, and marine biology. Dr. Lynch is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), former Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, and current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. He is also the 2009 winner of the Walter Munk Award. His primary hobby is amateur astronomy, and he is the current president of the Cape Cod Astronomical Society.
IEEE OES Emeritus Award
Title: IEEE OES Emeritus Award
Description. The award will be presented to an OES member having been particularly important for the Society and who is no longer in any position of Society governance. A call for nominations will be issued by the Awards Committee, which will choose the recipients.
Administration. Administered by the Oceanic Engineering Society
Eligibility. The recipients shall be member of the IEEE in good standing of at least the grade of Senior Member, and member of the Oceanic Engineering Society. Eligibility and Selection process shall comply with procedures and regulation established in IEEE and Society governing documents, particularly with IEEE Policy 4.4 on Awards Limitations.
Prize Items. Photo-Engraved Plaque
Frequency: Annual. The award will be given only if a suitable awardee is identified.
Funds. Potential cost of a conference registration, lodging and travel for the recipient if not already a registrant of the conference where the award is presented. The society’s budget includes the expenses for this award and the Society budget is net positive with the inclusion of the award.
Nominee Solicitation. The OES Awards Committee will issue a call for nominees.
Awards Committee. The Panel for the Emeritus Award shall be the Junior Past President as Chair, the Senior Past President, and another Past President. The Chair may select other members of the Awards Committee according to their qualification for this particular Award. In the event that any of these is nominated for the Emeritus Award, the Chair shall select other members of the Awards Committee to reach a total of at least three referees.
Schedule. The call for nomination is issued at the end of March and closes at the end of May. The recipients are chosen by the end of June. The Awards Committee Chair shall, following the close of nominations, select the members of the Awards Committee appropriate to the qualifications of the nominees to serve, with him or her as chair.
Selection/Basis for Judging. The Awards Committee requests a nomination form providing the listing of qualifications of the nominee relevant to the award criteria.
Presentation. The Award will be presented at the Fall OCEANS conference.
Publicity. The call shall be publicized in the Society Newsletter, The Beacon; the Society’s website, the Society’s LinkedIn page; and other Society media. The announcement shall also be forwarded to other professional publications, both physical and virtual.
Past IEEE OES Emeritus Award Recipients
2019 James Lynch
2018 Daniel Alspach
2017 Joseph Czika
2016 Fred Maltz
2015 Joseph Vadus & Claude Brancart
2014 Glen Williams, Stan Chamberlain & Norman Miller


Dr. James V. Candy is the Chief Scientist for Engineering and former Director of the Center for Advanced Signal & Image Sciences at the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy received a commission in the USAF in 1967 and was a Systems Engineer/Test Director from 1967 to 1971. He has been a Researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1976 holding various positions including that of Project Engineer for Signal Processing and Thrust Area Leader for Signal and Control Engineering. Educationally, he received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Cincinnati and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is a registered Control System Engineer in the state of California. He has been an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco State University, University of Santa Clara, and UC Berkeley, Extension teaching graduate courses in signal and image processing. He is an Adjunct Full-Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Candy is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and elected as a Life Member (Fellow) at the University of Cambridge (Clare Hall College). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies. He was elected as a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Candy received the IEEE Distinguished Technical Achievement Award for the “development of model-based signal processing in ocean acoustics.” Dr. Candy was selected as a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for oceanic signal processing as well as presenting an IEEE tutorial on advanced signal processing available through their video website courses. He was nominated for the prestigious Edward Teller Fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy was awarded the Interdisciplinary Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal in Signal Processing/Underwater Acoustics by the Acoustical Society of America for his technical contributions. He has published over 225 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports as well as written three texts in signal processing, “Signal Processing: the Model-Based Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1986), “Signal Processing: the Modern Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1988), “Model-Based Signal Processing,” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2006) and “Bayesian Signal Processing: Classical, Modern and Particle Filtering” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2009). He was the General Chairman of the inaugural 2006 IEEE Nonlinear Statistical Signal Processing Workshop held at the Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. He has presented a variety of short courses and tutorials sponsored by the IEEE and ASA in Applied Signal Processing, Spectral Estimation, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, Applied Model-Based Signal Processing, Applied Acoustical Signal Processing, Model-Based Ocean Acoustic Signal Processing and Bayesian Signal Processing for IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society/ASA. He has also presented short courses in Applied Model-Based Signal Processing for the SPIE Optical Society. He is currently the IEEE Chair of the Technical Committee on “Sonar Signal and Image Processing” and was the Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on “Signal Processing in Acoustics” as well as being an Associate Editor for Signal Processing of ASA (on-line JASAXL). He was recently nominated for the Vice Presidency of the ASA and elected as a member of the Administrative Committee of IEEE OES. His research interests include Bayesian estimation, identification, spatial estimation, signal and image processing, array signal processing, nonlinear signal processing, tomography, sonar/radar processing and biomedical applications.
Kenneth Foote is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The George Washington University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University in 1973. He was an engineer at Raytheon Company, 1968-1974; postdoctoral scholar at Loughborough University of Technology, 1974-1975; research fellow and substitute lecturer at the University of Bergen, 1975-1981. He began working at the Institute of Marine Research, Bergen, in 1979; joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1999. His general area of expertise is in underwater sound scattering, with applications to the quantification of fish, other aquatic organisms, and physical scatterers in the water column and on the seafloor. In developing and transitioning acoustic methods and instruments to operations at sea, he has worked from 77°N to 55°S.
René Garello, professor at Télécom Bretagne, Fellow IEEE, co-leader of the TOMS (Traitements, Observations et Méthodes Statistiques) research team, in Pôle CID of the UMR CNRS 3192 Lab-STICC.
Professor Mal Heron is Adjunct Professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and is CEO of Portmap Remote Ocean Sensing Pty Ltd. His PhD work in Auckland, New Zealand, was on radio-wave probing of the ionosphere, and that is reflected in his early ionospheric papers. He changed research fields to the scattering of HF radio waves from the ocean surface during the 1980s. Through the 1990s his research has broadened into oceanographic phenomena which can be studied by remote sensing, including HF radar and salinity mapping from airborne microwave radiometers . Throughout, there have been one-off papers where he has been involved in solving a problem in a cognate area like medical physics, and paleobiogeography. Occasionally, he has diverted into side-tracks like a burst of papers on the effect of bushfires on radio communications. His present project of the Australian Coastal Ocean Radar Network (ACORN) is about the development of new processing methods and applications of HF radar data to address oceanography problems. He is currently promoting the use of high resolution VHF ocean radars, based on the PortMap high resolution radar.
Hanu Singh graduated B.S. ECE and Computer Science (1989) from George Mason University and Ph.D. (1995) from MIT/Woods Hole.He led the development and commercialization of the Seabed AUV, nine of which are in operation at other universities and government laboratories around the world. He was technical lead for development and operations for Polar AUVs (Jaguar and Puma) and towed vehicles(Camper and Seasled), and the development and commercialization of the Jetyak ASVs, 18 of which are currently in use. He was involved in the development of UAS for polar and oceanographic applications, and high resolution multi-sensor acoustic and optical mapping with underwater vehicles on over 55 oceanographic cruises in support of physical oceanography, marine archaeology, biology, fisheries, coral reef studies, geology and geophysics and sea-ice studies. He is an accomplished Research Student advisor and has made strong collaborations across the US (including at MIT, SIO, Stanford, Columbia LDEO) and internationally including in the UK, Australia, Canada, Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, India, Sweden and Norway. Hanu Singh is currently Chair of the IEEE Ocean Engineering Technology Committee on Autonomous Marine Systems with responsibilities that include organizing the biennial IEEE AUV Conference, 2008 onwards. Associate Editor, IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 2007-2011. Associate editor, Journal of Field Robotics 2012 onwards.
Milica Stojanovic graduated from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1988, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, in 1991 and 1993. She was a Principal Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2008 joined Northeastern University, where she is currently a Professor of electrical and computer engineering. She is also a Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Milica’s research interests include digital communications theory, statistical signal processing and wireless networks, and their applications to underwater acoustic systems. She has made pioneering contributions to underwater acoustic communications, and her work has been widely cited. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and serves as an Associate Editor for its Journal of Oceanic Engineering (and in the past for Transactions on Signal Processing and Transactions on Vehicular Technology). She also serves on the Advisory Board of the IEEE Communication Letters, and chairs the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society’s Technical Committee for Underwater Communication, Navigation and Positioning. Milica is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE/OES Distinguished Technical Achievement Award.
Dr. Paul C. Hines was born and raised in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. From 1977-1981 he attended Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, graduating with a B.Sc. (Hon) in Engineering-Physics.