Associate Chief Technologist

Tom Cwik

Dr. Tom Cwik is the Associate Chief Technologist for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Previous to this position he managed the Earth Science Instruments & Technology Office. In this capacity he focused on identifying strategic areas of research, pro-actively developing and sustaining technology and instrument-development work for Earth-based remote sensing including work in the Instrument Incubator and Advanced Component Technology programs as well as developing the UAVSAR project, bringing it from the Instrument Incubator level to a fully funded airborne instrument project. Prior to this role he was proposal manger of Aquarius, chosen as a NASA Earth System Pathfinder mission to measure sea surface salinity from space. Since 2004, Tom has been the Initiative Lead for the Precision Deployable Aperture Systems task that has built a test facility for deployment, characterization, and validated modeling of precision deployable aperture technologies that are key to future JPL missions.

His work has included the development and use of integrated electromagnetic design tools for instrument design at proposal and build stages; the invention and analysis of microdevice components for electromagnetic coupling and filtering in remote sensing instruments; and algorithm development for high performance computational electromagnetic applications. He has made contributions to frequency selective surface design and analysis, and asymptotic analysis in reflector antenna systems. Tom has worked at the Very Large Array, National Radio Astronomy Laboratory in Socorro N.M, building low-frequency feedhorns, at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, National Bureau of Standards (Now NIST) in Boulder CO building a 3-wavelength geodimeter and upon completion of his Ph.D. degree, at the Electronics Research Laboratory, Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim Norway where as a postdoctoral fellow he developed an analysis of shaped reflector antennas at and near caustic field locations.

Tom is an IEEE Fellow, a Principal Member at JPL and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington, Department of Electrical Engineering, Seattle. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.