SETI League Optical SETI Committee Chair Dr. Stuart Kingsley

Introducing:

The SETI League's Optical SETI Committee Chair

For the past few years Stuart Kingsely's name has been almost synonymous with Optical SETI. He has also been the voice in the wilderness, at times the only member of the SETI community willing to invest time and resources in the search for pulsed lasers in space, a search which (because of Stuart's diligence) is just now beginning to achieve some degree of legitimacy in scientific circles. Dr. Kingsley's Optical SETI Website is a SETI SuperStar Award winner.

Stuart A. Kingsley was born in Stoke Newington, London, England on May 15, 1948, and lived most of his life in South Tottenham, London. He attended Markfield Secondary Modern and Tottenham County schools. He received a B.Sc. Honors and Ph.D. in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from The City University, London, England, and University College London (UCL), England, in 1972 and 1984, respectively. He arrived in the states in 1981, and went to work for Battelle Columbus Division as a Principal Research Scientist, becoming a Senior Research Scientist in 1985. He left Battelle in 1987 and established his own photonics consultancy business Fiberdyne Optoelectronics. Since 1992 he has been the VP for Engineering at SRICO, Inc. He is also the Director of The Columbus Optical SETI Observatory which is shortly to be set up as a non-profit entity and is also President of ETI Photonics; the future business side for his Optical SETI activities. Presently, it is his income from his day job with SRICO Inc. which funds all his Optical SETI activities.

Stuart has been involved in producing a variety of fiber-optic sensors, including fiber-optic rotation sensors. He won the Barlow Prize while a research student at UCL. Stuart invented the fiber-optic line-stretcher and fiber-optic line-squeezer phase modulators that are now important components in fiber-optic sensing systems. In 1984, he shared the prestigious Rank Prize for Optoelectronics with his thesis advisor Professor, Sir D.E.N. Davies (Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Ministry of Defense and IEE President in 1995/1996), for their pioneering work on fiber-optic sensing and coherent fiber-optic data highways. He is the author of over 50 papers, mainly in coherent fiber-optic systems, the so-called fiberdyne effect or modal noise phenomena in fibers, and distributed fiber-optic sensing. Stuart also has several patents.

Stuart has arranged and chaired sessions and two international Optical SETI conferences for SPIE (The International Society for Optical Engineering) and is presently planning a third conference to be held in 2001. As VP of Engineering for SRICO, Inc., he is involved in the design and development of novel integrated optic wideband electric field and voltage sensing devices. In 1996, SRICO was awarded the prestigious R&D 100 Award by R&D Magazine for a new photonic electric-field sensor product, for which Stuart Kingsley was one of the inventors. SRICO is also developing ultra-wideband, high dynamic range analog fiber optic communication links. Stuart is a member of the IEE, a British Chartered Engineer, a senior member of IEEE, a member of Eta Kappa Nu Association, and belongs to various space interest groups. Stuart is a volunteer with the Ohio State University SETI Group. Dr. Kingsley has been a U.S. citizen since 1995.

Other professional interests of his include the possible adverse health effects of electromagnetic pollution, and the adverse effects of fluorescent lighting/VDT flicker. Presently, he is revisiting and pioneering the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in the Optical Spectrum, where he brings to the subject his considerable expertise in photonics. Stuart is constructing a prototype Visible Optical SETI Observatory whose aim is to detect ultra-fast pulsed and monochromatic continuous wave laser beacon signals emanating from star systems within a few hundred light years of earth.

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