Charles W. Therrien was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He received both undergraduate and graduate (MS, PhD) degrees from MIT in Electrical Engineering. He was a member of the technical staff at Lincoln Laboratory from 1971 to 1984, when he moved to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. During his more than twenty years at the Naval Postgraduate School he taught courses in systems and signal processing and authored three books and numerous papers in these areas.
During his tenure at the Naval Postgraduate School, Dr. Therrien had research sponsored by many organizations in the Navy, Air Force and others such as DARPA and NSA. He also served as Associate Department head for teaching. In 1997 and 1998 he was on sabbatical leave at MIT (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and at the Technical University at Delft (Netherlands). During this time he became interested in the history of electrical engineering and spent a portion of his time at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics reading the early literature and interviewing those who participated who were still living.
Dr. Therrien is currently Professor Emeritus at the Naval Postgraduate School, having retired in 2005. He is married with two adult daughters and lives in Monterey.
Professor Therrien is currently retired from the Naval Postgraduate School but remains active in his primary area of Statistical Signal Processing. He remains actively involved in the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers and is Chairman of the organization (SS & C Corporation of California) that sponsors the conference. He teaches occasionally in the electrical engineering department and is available for lecturing, consulting, and delivery of short courses.
This page was last updated 01/05/07