Bruce Lusignan (born 1936) [1] is an emeritus [2] [3] professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University [4] [5] and a visiting professor at Portland State University. [6] He earned his B.S.E.E ('58), M.S.E.E. ('59) and Ph.D. ('63) degrees from Stanford. [6] In the early 1960s, he worked in radio astronomy at Stanford. [7] [8] He has been director of Stanford's Communication Satellite Planning Center [9] [10] and Stanford's Center for International Cooperation in Space. [5] He has also owned a small company designing cellular phones and pagers. [11]
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His areas of specialization are communications satellites, telephone switches, cellular networks and the related signal processing problems. [6] He is inventor or co-inventor on 16 patents, including devices for metering power, [12] RF signal reception, [13] satellite transceivers, [14] alarm systems for cellular base stations, [15] tone generators for telephony, [16] and VSAT terminals. [17]
He has worked on designs for reusable launch vehicles [9] based on the Black Horse concept. [18] and has helped direct planning efforts for international cooperation on Mars exploration with the then-Soviet Union. [4] [19] [20] [21] He led later post-Soviet cooperation in planning for an international Mars mission that included a space logistics function for ICBMs: using missiles such as the SS-18 to pre-position fuel and other supplies in Earth orbit, and Russia's Energia booster to send the supplies to Mars ahead of the crew. [22]
Lusignan also takes a strong interest in the politics and issues that arise in economic development, [6] including sustainable development in Africa, [10] earthquake relief and reconstruction in Peru, [23] and rural telecommunications in the Middle East. [24] For a number of years he ran EDGE – "Ethics of Development in a Global Environment" [25] – a weekly seminar at Stanford about issues in international conflict, trade, environmental sustainability, and amelioration of poverty and racism. [2] [5]
In 1982, he was one of a number of professors who, with the support of their institutions, openly defied restrictions on use of otherwise-publicly available materials rationalized via the Arms Export Control Act. [26]
