Joan Lurie, PhD
Remote Sensing Applications Manager, TRW

Dr. Joan Lurie's current job is Remote Sensing Applications Manager at TRW with emphasis on business acquisition in the areas of commercial, government and environmental applications. Dr. Lurie (shown at left with Gloria Steinem at WITI's 1995 Channels for Change conference) has over twenty years experience in industry and academia in management, market analysis and strategic planning for use of satellite imagery data of the earth.

Dr. Lurie is an expert in remote sensing with emphasis on issues relating to data management, compression and product generation. For the past two years, Dr Lurie has been concentrating on commercial and civil applications of remotely sensed data in US and international markets. She and her staff have worked with TRW's hyperspectral data and other data sources to develop applications in agriculture, mineral exploration and timber assessment. She has been involved in several international marketing initiatives and is TRW's representative on the board of the National Remote Sensing Centre in England, a private company of which TRW is part owner. The NRSC produces value added products for various land resource management applications from satellite and airborne images of the earth.

Since joining TRW in 1991, Dr. Lurie's responsibilities have included business and technical support to establish the utility of imagery and signal data for military users. She has managed a classified study dealing with multispectral data utility for intelligence, several proposals and a marketing effort to the imagery community with emphasis on the processing, compression and exploitation of multispectral data. Dr. Lurie designed, implemented and currently manages a facility for analysis, exploitation and archiving of hyperspectral and other imagery data.

Formerly, at the MITRE Corporation, Dr. Lurie managed a project to develop a future architecture for a large government software system supporting imagery exploitation. At Hughes Aircraft Company, she was acquisition manager for an imagery data exploitation product line. Her responsibilities included technology assessment, systems engineering, and acquisition of new business in all areas related to imagery analysis and imagery understanding.

Dr. Lurie's educational background is in physics. When she received her PhD in physics at Rutgers University in 1967, the University was 201 years old and she was the first female to be granted a PhD by the physics dept!! Her grades, on graduating from Brooklyn College of CUNY, (straight A's) would have qualified for Princeton but she was told they did not accept women. When Joan received her master's degree (also straight A's) Bell Laboratories told her (1962) that they might hire a woman programmer but, if she wanted to be a physicist she was unacceptable.

Luckily RCA felt differently - they not only hired Dr. Lurie but sent her back to school to get her Ph D!!

In 1994 and 1995, Dr. Lurie was a conference chairperson at an international symposia entitled Satellite Remote Sensing I and II cosponsored by the SPIE and the European Optical Society. The conferences she chaired were entitled "Satellite Photogrammetry and GIS" (1994) and, "GIS, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Data Management" (1995).

In 1996 she has been invited to chair a session on Terrestrial Applications of Multispectral Data at the the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) Annual meeting and to continue in her role as chair of the Data Management session at Satellite Remote Sensing III in Taormina, Sicily.

Dr. Lurie has two grown sons. One son is a legal/technical research consultant in Seattle and the other a policeman in El Segundo. Dr. Lurie's husband is a computer consultant in Los Angeles, California. Both Joan and her husband enjoy beach, tennis, theatre, travel and playing bridge in their leisure time.

Other Professional Activities