Biography of Melvin A. Lewis

My background as an electronics engineer includes 37 years full-time experience designing circuits and systems, including sophisticated instrumentation, in the defense industry (32 years at BAE Systems, formerly Lockheed Martin Fairchild Systems, Yonkers, and before that - Loral Electronic Systems). I also worked at American Optical Company in their laser research lab. I have a BSEE degree from Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. (1961), and an MS (in Electrical Engineering) from Columbia Univ. I currently teach full time (since the year 2000) at Fairleigh Dickinson Univ., Teaneck, NJ, USA. My courses include Electromagnetic Fields and Waves (undergrad.) and Optics Engineering (graduate). I am an Assoc. Director of the School of Computer Sciences at FDU. I am a senior life member of the IEEE, a former chair of the North Jersey Section. I was a governor of IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, and I am a member of the AOC (an electronic countermeasures engineering society), the AAAS and AIP/APS (where I am a charter member of the Topical Group on Gravitation). I have a patent in electro-optics, and I have written about ten technical articles, including five on the GW topic. One GW article was for IEEE Spectrum (May 95), one for IEEE Antennas and Propagation magazine (Jun 95), and the rest more recently. I have been doing non-experimental independent investigations in Gravitational Wave detection for 23 years. 

This is a rebirth of an earlier site that can be used for posting information regarding the search for gravitational waves. Of course, now that they have been detected by LIGO (in Sept. 2015), things are going forward in a different way. Originally, the Oakland Institute for Gravitational Wave Research (OIGWR) was focused on sharing information on the search for gravitational waves. Now it will follow the evolution of the process of detecting events that cause ripples in spacetime. We will also discuss new ideas that could further the sensitivity perhaps by improving signal to noise ratio using new digital filtering techniques.

I was and still am the Director of the OIGWR which was originally formed in early 1999. It is a non-profit organization that (in it's reincarnation) does not charge a membership fee.

Since I am an Electronics Engineer (BSEE, Fairleigh Dickinson University '61, MSEE Columbia University '63), teaching EE courses full time at FDU, and with decades of experience in the defense industry (before 2000), my personal focus will be on the electronics and electro-optics aspects of the equipment being used and developed. I am also somewhat familiar with the physics of gravitational waves and their sources.

I have written several unpublished (except for earlier posting on the internet) articles and papers on GW (not recently). I have given GW talks at several universities and conferences in NY, NJ, TX, and VA, . I have also investigated the feasibility of creating a weak GW signal generator for calibrating GW detectors (among other things related to the commonalities and differences between Electromagnetic and Gravitational Waves. .

Perhaps you would like to participate. If so, please post to this blog or (better yet if you will be providing non-public information) email me at m714lewis@gmail.com

Thanks