The work environment at a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) can feel like a blend of academic rigor, government purpose, and industry practicality. FFRDCs are partnerships between a government agency (like DoE, DoD, NASA, NSF, etc) and a private institution (usually universities) with the goal to do science research on behalf of the government, outside of any organizational conflicts of interest that can arise in industry contracts. I’ll talk about how a DoD lab like Lincoln is different from DoE labs like Argonne, Fermi, or LBNL National Labs, and how it’s different from working in industry or academia, both in terms of the types of projects and the project funding paths. The MIT-LL employee base includes a wide variety scientists and engineers at the PhD, MS/ME, and BS/BA/BE levels; I’ll give an overview of research topics across the Lab with special attention to areas with significant physics presence. In particular, I’ll show some results from my group’s MACHETE ladar mapping sensor and talk about how physics and engineering intersect when we’re designing and testing airborne sensor platforms.

The Multi-look Airborne Collector for Human Encampment and Terrain Extraction (MACHETE) is a ladar system that produces high-quality, 3D imagery from data captured from an altitude of 25 kft over a wide area at a very fast coverage rate. This system also can peek through openings in dense canopy to form detailed images of natural and human-made structures existing at and near the ground level. For a forested area that has 90% canopy cover and is the size of New York City’s Central Park (3.4 km 2 ), MACHETE can provide detailed images of every building, footbridge, and walkway below the canopy at 25 cm resolution in about 5 minutes.

Emily Peterson is a ladar and optical sensor designer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and is an AMO physicist by training, with a PhD from University of Michigan in 2005. She did her dissertation work in Phil Bucksbaum’s group using ultrafast lasers to study nonsequential double ionization of noble gasses, and polarization-driven molecular alignment. That work extended to time-resolved x-ray measurements of laser-ionization processes during a post-doc at Argonne National Lab. In 2008 she joined the plasma spectroscopy group at Osram-Sylvania Lighting to study high-pressure discharge lamp technologies, until industry funding for plasma R&D faded with increasing consumer interest in LEDs. Since 2014, she has applied her grad school skills with pulsed lasers, detection statistics, optics and electronics hardware, and experiment design in the Active Optical Systems group at MIT Lincoln Lab, where she models, designs, builds, and tests ladar sensor systems.