The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in the profession and is conferred only by invitation of the Board of Directors upon a person of outstanding and extraordinary qualifications and experience in IEEE designated fields (including electrical engineering, electronics, computer engineering and computer sciences, and the allied branches of engineering and related arts and sciences), who has made important individual contributions to one or more of these fields, that have been reflected in an improved quality of life for society.
     The IEEE Bylaws limit the number of members who can be advanced to Fellow grade in any one year to one-tenth of one percent of the total Institute membership, exclusive of Students and Associates, on record as of December 31 of the year preceding. Nominations are evaluated by the Technical Society/Council engaged in the technical field in which the candidate is active.
     Candidates must be an IEEE Senior Member at the time of nomination and have been an IEEE Member for at least 5 years. Any person, including those who are not members of the IEEE, may nominate a candidate. The exceptions are IEEE Officers involved in Fellow evaluations and IEEE Staff.
     This year three OES members were selected to receive the designation of IEEE Fellow. Congratulations to all of these highly qualified members.

Ross Chapman studied physics as an undergraduate student at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario (B.Sc., 1968), and continued graduate research in physics at the University of British Columbia where he received a Ph.D. in 1975. His introduction to the world of ocean science came afterwards, at the Defence Research Establishment Pacific (DREP) in the navy dockyard in Esquimalt BC. Dr. Chapman joined the Canadian defence laboratory in 1976 as a defence scientist in the Ocean Acoustics group, and spent the next 20 years in underwater acoustics research. DREP was a uniquely well-equipped laboratory for ocean science, with its own research vessel, CFAV ENDEAVOUR, in the dockyard. He was Chief Scientist on over 20 sea trials on the ENDEAVOUR from 1976–1995. These included the Pacific Echo experiments in collaboration with the Naval Research Laboratory to demonstrate the concept of matched field source localization at sea, and the Heard Island Feasibility Test on ocean acoustic thermometry in 1991. From 1986–1988, he spent two years as an exchange scientist at the Defence Scientific Establishment in Auckland, New Zealand studying ambient noise processes in the ocean. Dr. Chapman left DREP in 1995 when he was appointed Senior Research Chair in Ocean Acoustics at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria (UVic). The academic and research program in Ocean Acoustics that he has established at UVic with Dr. Stan Dosso is unique in Canada. He and his colleague Dr. Stan Dosso have graduated more than 20 Masters and Ph.D. students who have gone into research and development positions at industrial and government laboratories.
     Dr. Chapman is internationally recognized for his research on the interaction of sound with the ocean bottom. His work has fundamental importance in understanding the physics of sound propagation in marine sediments, and in applications for acoustic characterization of sea bottom materials and sonar performance prediction. Acousticians describe the interaction of sound with the ocean bottom by geoacoustic models, profiles of the variation with depth of the physical properties of sea bed materials, such as sound speed, density and attenuation. Estimates of these parameters are used as inputs to numerical calculations of the acoustic field. Dr. Chapman’s research in the development and application of methods for estimating parameters of geoacoustic models from experimental data has stimulated work in this research field in naval, academic and applied research laboratories nationally and internationally. He has published over 90 refereed papers on ocean acoustic propagation and geoacoustic inversion, mostly in the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and has presented over 125 papers at conferences (~30 invited). His research at UVic has expanded to include geoacoustic characterization of marine gas hydrates and applications of acoustic sea bed classification for marine habitat assessment, in collaboration with the local marine R&D industry, Quester Tangent Corporation in Sidney, British Columbia. Dr. Chapman is an active member of the Victoria Chapter of the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society, and is an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering. He is also a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), and from 2004–2007 was the Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on Acoustical Oceanography.

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, Boston, MA, in 1991 and 1993. After a number of years with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a Principal Scientist, she joined the faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University in 2008. She is also a Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and a Visiting Scientist at MIT. Her research interests include digital communications theory, statistical signal processing and wireless networks, and their applications to underwater acoustic communication systems. Milica is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering and the IEEE Transactions on Signal processing.

Professor John Vesecky grew up in Dallas, Texas and studied Electrical Engineering at Rice University before attending graduate school at Stanford. His career in science, engineering and university education spans X-ray astronomy to remote sensing with HF radar and microwaves. After a Research Fellowship in Astronomy he taught astronomy at the University of Leicester (UK) and went on to do teaching and research at Stanford, Michigan and now the University of California at Santa Cruz. In the 1970’s he was selected for the Jason study group and has participated in Jason Summer Studies on nationally important topics ever since, including climate change and applications of ultra-precise clocks. In the 1990’s Prof. Vesecky was selected as Sensor Team Leader for Vice-President Gore’s Environmental Task Force that identified classified data of environmental value and argued successfully for declassification. In 1999 he was selected as Founding Chairman of the Electrical Engineering Department in the new Jack Baskin Engineering School at UC Santa Cruz. He has served as Chair or Associate Chair ever since, guiding the department to successful accreditation and growth.
     Examples of his research interests and accomplishments are his work in applying HF (decameter) ground wave radar and microwave synthetic aperture radar to ocean measurements. He has worked in HF radar since the 1980’s and led a team at Michigan, Stanford and the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM) to design, develop, construct and deploy the only extant four-frequency HF radar system (MCR), allowing surface current measurements at multiple depths. Prof. Vesecky and his group showed that currents near the surface in Monterey Bay exhibit a definitive Ekman spiral behavior. MCR radars near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay led to calibration of the relationship between the effective depth of the HF radar currents and in-situ measurements. MCR deployments on Lake Michigan led to the first time histories of the surface current patterns; both observed (by HF radar) and predicted using lake circulation models. This showed that the difficulties of HF radar on fresh water lakes could be overcome using appropriate frequencies. More recently MCRs on Monterey Bay were used to measure the properties of the vector, surface wind field, including wind field eddies and the first measurements of the friction velocity in the air and water using HF radar. A second example is microwave remote sensing applications of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to ocean winds and sea ice. In the1980’s Dr. Vesecky and graduate student Steve Durden developed an ocean wavenumber spectrum model that responds at high wavenumbers to ocean surface winds. This “Durden-Vesecky” spectrum has had lasting impact in ocean surface scattering models, both active and passive. His research at Stanford made sea ice tracking more accurate and efficient, showing the use of object-oriented feature tracking and the extraction of lead and ridge features from SAR images. He worked with graduate student Qian Lin to develop new methods for image registration and phase unwrapping and applied these to terrain elevation recovery from interferometric SAR. The review by Vesecky and Stewart was a landmark paper, showing opportunities for ocean surface sensing by SAR, based on the SeaSat instrument. It was important in arguing for the deployment of space based SAR, e.g. ERS, RadarSat, Envisat and the Shuttle SAR. Professor Vesecky has been active in IEEE activities since it was the IRE and AIEE, including the Ocean Engineering Society, the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society and the Antennas and Propagation Society.
     He has a lifelong interest in amateur radio and holds an amateur extra class FCC license, AE6TL. In his community he provides leadership and labor in the Calvary Food Pantry that distributes food regularly, providing about 50,000 meals each year to the hungry in downtown Santa Cruz. At home he enjoys his family of wife Cynthia, son Stephen, daughter Holly and son in law Josh as well as playing the ukulele and the guitar and singing at family events.