Description
Philip Erickson is director of MIT's Haystack Observatory and a Principal Research Scientist at MIT. MIT Haystack is a multi-disciplinary radio and radar observatory, conducting fundamental research for a variety of sponsors in the fields of radio astronomy, geospace/near-Earth space, very long baseline interferometry, and geodesy. Techniques pioneered at Haystack include active and passive radio-based experiments and data analysis using a variety of remote sensing approaches involving ground- and space-based data. Phil's background concentrates on the experimental techniques, signal processing, and first-principles physics of near-Earth ionospheric (charged) and thermospheric (neutral) remote sensing using high power large aperture radars, software radars and software radio architectures, and plasma physics. Phil also is a co-director of the education and public outreach efforts at MIT Haystack, spanning undergraduate research programs, graduate student interactions, K–12 classroom units and outreach, and public Observatory tours and lectures. He has an electrical engineering background and received a PhD in space plasma physics from Cornell University in 1998.
