IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - January 2023 - 104

Interview With Dr. William Dale Blair
Four generations of Blairs: Tim, Stephanie, Dale, Chris, Autumn, Kathy,
Joyce, Sawyer, and Katelyn.
Shalom. I also initiated the ISIF Young Investigator
Award and David Crouse was the first recipient.
Peter: Do you have any advice for students? How about
for young professionals starting out?
Dale: My advice to students is take your engineering education
seriously. Solve every problem that you are given and
develop yourmental capacity to solve harder problems. Engineering
school is for the brain like weightlifting for your
muscles. The more weight you lift, the stronger you get.
My advice to young professionals is find a job that
challenges you and grow into that job. Learn something
with every task you do. If your job does not provide you
challenges in which you can grow, find another job.
Always maintain forward progress in your professional
growth. Also, find a mentor who can discuss your profession
growth with you and advise you on the daily challenges
that you find in the workplace.
Peter: Suppose you spoke to a young person who, like
yourself, is smart and aggressive, and who wants to help
his country. What sort of career would you recommend?
Government laboratory? Large ( " big prime " ) industry?
Academia? Small (SBIR) business?
Dale: This choice of employment depends on what you
want out of your career. If you want to build things, make
them work, and deploy them in the real-world, Industry in
your best option.
If you want to solve hard problems for the first time and
demonstrate accomplishments in prototypes or test environments,
assess/evaluate others engineering products/proposals,
104
teach, and publish, a university laboratory or research institute
or a government lab is a good option for you.
In a small business, you get to work on interesting problems
ifyou can get the funding to do that. However, transitioning
developments to real-world applications is very
challenging from a small business.
Academic positions are very good for those who are
innovative researchers and motivated to work hard and
long hours. Otherwise, academic positions may become a
less than rewarding career.
Peter: Please tell us about the technical contributions you
are most proud of.
Dale: The tracking experiment that we conducted with
the AN/SPY-1 radar at Wallops Island in 1996 is one
of the tops. We demonstrated in real time that
advanced tracking algorithms could reduce the radar
time and energy required for surveillance tracking by
60%. My contributions to tracking benchmarks played
a big role in getting the funding and algorithms for
that demonstration.
The results and knowledge gained on monopulse radar
and unresolved objects in my Ph.D. research has proved to
be very influential in the development of the U.S. BMDS.
There are results in my dissertation research that have yet
to be utilized.
I have been very proud of my contributions to the
deployment of the early versions of C2BMC in the U.S.
BMDS. The contributors to that were many and I served
as the leader for the development ofthe modeling and simulation
environment for the algorithm development and
the independent assessment for the U.S. government.
IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
JANUARY 2023
IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - January 2023

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