John R. Tower (SM ’03) received the B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa., and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976, 1980, and 1993 respectively.

He started his career at RCA Advanced Technology Laboratories, Moorestown N.J. developing charge coupled device (CCD) technology for signal processing and imaging applications from 1976 to 1987. This organization became part of General Electric (GE) Aerospace in 1987. From 1987 to 1989 he was involved in development of imaging solutions for space applications. In 1989 he joined Sarnoff Corporation, Princeton N.J. (formerly RCA David Sarnoff Research Center). He has been directing the development of CCD and CMOS APS imagers and cameras for custom, high performance applications. He has published forty-two papers in publications including IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on CCDs and Advanced Image Sensors, RCA Review, Proceedings of International Conference on Scientific Optical Imaging, and SPIE Conference Proceedings. He has ten issued US patents. He is currently Technical Director, Sarnoff Imaging Systems focusing on very high speed CCD imagers/cameras and high performance, backside illuminated CMOS imagers.