| AWARDS |
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| Robert J. Barker is the IEEE NPSS Plasma Science and Applications Award winner for 2009. Bob, a Fellow of the IEEE (1997), as well as a Fellow of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) (1998), is the program manager for Electro-Energetic Physics in the Directorate of Physics and Electronics of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1978 and his B.S. in Physics from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1971. Educated under Oscar Buneman in plasma theory and computation at Stanford, he has established himself as a world leader in a broad range of subdisciplines of plasma science. During his 24 years as Program Manager at AFOSR, he has been an untiring advocate for plasma science and its many applications. He has been a principal architect of programs in a number of key areas. For more than 15 years, Dr. Barker has provided the single largest fraction of federal grant funding for the study of novel and promising HPM sources. Working closely with the HPM division of AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate (AFRL/RDH), Bob has been at the forefront of a broad range of source technologies, including plasma-filled microwave sources (e.g., – the PASOTRON), relativistic magnetrons, multiple-beam klystrons (MBKs), higher-harmonic amplifiers, frequency-multiplying gyro devices, and others. He was a leader in the U.S. R&D community in recognizing the importance of a modest plasma background density in an HPM source to help neutralize the electric self-repulsion of the driving electron-beam. Another key contribution to this technology has been Bob’s successful campaign to create ties of collaboration between the HPM field and the vacuum electronics field. He co-edited (with E. Schamiloglu) the landmark 2001 IEEE/Wiley Press book, High Power Microwave Sources and Technologies that provided the internationally expanding community with a superbly referenced in-depth technical overview of the entire field. Bob has also remained the leader over the past two decades in providing federal basic research funding in the field of vacuum electronics. Working closely with the Vacuum Electronics Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory he has been instrumental in connecting the vacuum electronics and HPM research communities. Just as the vacuum electronics community has educated researchers in HPM on techniques for minimizing vacuum pressures, HPM researchers helped to familiarize the vacuum electronics engineers with the physics of ultra-intense electron-beams, cold-cathode options, and elevated internal electric fields. Such familiarity has proven invaluable as vacuum electronics researchers, in steadily compressing the size of their devices to achieve even moderate power levels at frequencies of 100 GHz and above, encounter the same surface power densities that have plagued the HPM research community from its inception. A principal thrust of Bob’s leadership in this field has been to push toward ever-higher frequency sources through selective sponsorship of such novel concepts as Stanford’s “klystrino” that held the promise of kilowatt power levels of 94 GHz radiation in an extremely compact (few cm) package that could be made man-portable. Such AFOSR-sponsored projects stimulated further related research on “micro-sources” using MEMS fabrication technology. Bob has personally championed this key trend through presentations he has made to leading international conferences over the past six years. Dr. Barker invented (under an Air Force patent) the concept of a smart, adaptive e-beam-driven microwave source whose subcomponents are outfitted with sensor and actuator arrays that can sense real-time operating parameters and adjust them in response in order to maintain optimum performance. He served as Managing Editor (with co-editors J. Booske, N.C. Luhmann, Jr., and G. Nusinovich) of the landmark 2005 IEEE/Wiley Press book, Modern Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Power Electronics that now serves as the central reference work for the field of vacuum electronics. Dr. Barker provided crucial initial strong support and funding to the pioneering scientific studies of Professor Karl H. Schoenbach of Old Dominion University examining the profound subcellular effects of nanosecond pulses of megavolt/meter electric fields on human cells. To foster this new area, he encouraged relevant new technical sessions be added to existing annual conferences and also helped establish and organize the “ElectroMed” conferences that were held biannually starting in 1999 through 2005. New research groups have now been established worldwide to explore this promising new field. In helping to shepherd this field, Bob focused attention on the critical discovery that the ultra-short bursts directly triggered the release of calcium ions from the endoplasmic reticulum of cells thereby resulting in specific modifications to the behavior of neurotransmitters. In the mid-1980s Bob was among the first to recognize the importance (and future practicality) of moving simulation codes off the room-sized computers of the day and onto the newly emerging personal computers (PCs). At the same time he helped champion the creation of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for the powerful modeling codes thereby making their use accessible to all plasma researchers, not just professional modelers. In the early 1990s, Bob had the vision to launch AFOSR’s “Object-Oriented Particle-in-Cell (OOPIC)” plasma modeling program whose objective was to bring the benefits of the emerging object-oriented programming revolution to the world of plasma simulation. The fruits of this effort carry on today in UC-Berkeley’s highly successful “XOOPIC” code that continues to be applied to a variety of plasma simulation study areas. Dr. Barker was the driving force behind and continues to sponsor the “MAGIC Users’ Group” as an ongoing scientific collaboration between university researchers funded under his AFOSR program and the proven modeling power of the Mission Research branch of ATK through their world-class MAGIC suite of multidimensional relativistic parallel-capable electromagnetic particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation codes. Over its lifetime of more than a decade, this group has provided AFOSR researchers with crucial scientific results that have helped form the basis for literally hundreds of refereed journal articles and conference publications. In addition to providing leadership and support to the HPM source development community, Dr. Barker also recognized that advances in pulsed power technology would be required in order for military applications of such sources to be realized. He has advocated and provided support for pioneering work in high-voltage insulator breakdown phenomenology, fast switches in liquid phases, novel ultra-wideband source and antenna technology, explosively driven flux compression generators, as well as research aimed at improved breakdown tolerance in HPM systems. His MURIs in compact pulsed power and explosively driven pulsed power were particularly successful in advancing these important areas. His continued leadership in this area is evidenced by the fact that he was recently named by the AGED panel as Co-chair of the “Special Technology Area Review” on compact, portable Pulse Power. In addition, he served as a member of the organizing committee for the 2008 IEEE Power Modulator Conference. While serving as Chair of NPSS’ PSAC in 1994–5, he personally spearheaded efforts to get the group Pulsed Power, Inc., which organized the highly successful biannual Pulsed Power Conferences (PPCs), to join IEEE’s Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society (NPSS) as a full new Technical Committee. As part of this new arrangement, Barker personally championed the holding of periodic joint conferences that combined PSAC’s annual International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS) with the PPC in order to save participant travel funds and also to encourage further mingling of technical interests. This began with the highly successful 2001 Pulsed Power Plasma Science (PPPS) conference held in Las Vegas and then again in Albuquerque in 2007. Since the mid-1980s, Dr. Barker’s AFOSR program has fostered research into the efficient generation and sustainment of lightly ionized plasma in the earth’s ambient atmosphere. The ability of air with free electron densities as low as 10(8) per cc to absorb/refract broadband microwave radiation formed a compelling applications argument from the start of that work. The impact of this work proved much broader, however. The ten-year AFOSR program in this area led to significant spin-off of cold plasma applications in materials surface modification, engine ignition sustainment, emissions control, and biological decontamination/sterilization. This latter application has made significant commercial industrial inroads. A major scientific accomplishment of these AFOSR programs has been the use of short-pulse electric fields to sustain air plasmas; that has become a worldwide methodology of interest. Bob co-edited (with K. Becker, U. Kogelschatz, and K. Schoenbach) the important 2006 CRC Press review text Non-Equilibrium Air Plasmas at Atmospheric Pressures. This book summarizes the state-of-the-art and highlights the most promising avenues for research and applications. Dr. Barker has long been concerned with the low numbers of U.S. citizen students seeking PhDs in science and engineering, particularly in fields related to his AFOSR programmatic interest areas. Since arriving at AFOSR in the mid-1980s, he has sponsored various types of programs to help foster such enrollment. In particular, he has supplemented regular research grants in order to permit principal investigators to hire undergraduates to work in their labs full-time during the summer and part-time during the academic year. In fact, all of the royalties flowing from his three books go directly into funding such student conference participation. In addition to the achievements described above, Dr. Barker was also a highly decorated full colonel in the Air Force Reserves assigned for several years as HPM Special Projects Manager to AFRL’s Directed Energy Weapons Directorate at Kirtland AFB, NM. He retired from the Reserves in 2001. Prior to that, Colonel Barker also served as Senior Reservist for Armstrong Laboratory, AFOSR, and the Geophysics Laboratory for successive periods since 1986. He is a graduate of both the Air War College and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. He served as an AF Academy Admissions Liaison Officer before joining the AF Systems Command reserve program in 1979. Dr. Barker’s PSAC Award citation reads: For more than two decades of visionary leadership in the fields of non-equilibrium air plasmas, compact pulsed power, and high power microwave/millimeter-wave electronics. Bob Barker can be reached by phone at +1 703-696-8574; Fax:+1 703-696-8481, E-mail: robert.barker@afosr.af.mil. |
 Robert J. Barker Award Recipient |
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