I don't want you—or especially the taxpayers and program managers who fund my research—to think that I spend all of my time flitting about the world in search of adventure.  No indeed, I spend far more hours than I get paid for sitting in my office pushing equations around and developing highly mathematical computer codes.

  Over the years I've worked at the University of Washington Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean in Seattle, WA; the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA; SRI International in Menlo Park, CA; and I was the manager of the Environmental Optics Program at the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, VA.  Since 1996 I've been Senior Scientist and Vice President for Science at Sequoia Scientific, Inc., a small research and development company in Bellevue, WA.

  The two best known results of my life as a scientist are the graduate-level text book Light and Water:   Radiative Transfer in Natural Waters, and the HYDROLIGHT software package.

  Light and Water, published in 1994 by Academic Press (now out of print but available on CD), is 592 pages of equations, and you don't really need to read it unless you're serious about learning what happens to light once it gets underwater.  But be forewarned:  you can't call yourself an “optical oceanographer” unless you've thoroughly mastered the material in my book.

  HYDROLIGHT    is a big hairy computer program that solves the big hairy equations in Light and Water.   You tell HYDROLIGHT what is in the water (phytoplankton, mineral particles, dissolved organic matter, spilled oil, etc.), where the sun is in the sky, how big the surface waves are, how deep the water is, and a bunch of other stuff, and HYDROLIGHT then computes what happens to the sunlight as a function of depth, direction, and wavelength.   HYDROLIGHT is now used by optical oceanographers around the world, which for me is a very gratifying indication that my hours in the office have made the world a better place.

  I would appreciate it very much if you licensed a copy of HYDROLIGHT, which is way cheap at only $9995.00.  And remember, when you're writing out your check, as I always say, “Never buy one of something if you can get two for twice the price.”

  I love to teach and work with students.  I have taught courses at the Universities of Southern California, Washington, and Maine, and in Brazil.  I recently delivered the annual Riley Memorial Lecture at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  The title of my talk was "Taking the Hype out of Hyperspectral and Putting the System into Ecosystem."