Retirements

Richard Marleau (15K JPG)

For forty years, Associate Professor Richard Marleau focused his instructional and research efforts on the use of computers in on-line applications for use in real-time control and instrumentation. He established his status as licensed electrical engineer early in his professional career.

Beginning in 1970, Marleau was involved in establishing the computer-control and instrumentation lab, which today is a high-performance data acquisition and processing laboratory. His students experience an environment much like they will experience in the industrial world.

Marleau has also maintained close ties with a variety of process control industries. He took part in NASA-ASEE design studies on two occasions, as well as the ASEE Industrial Residency Program, which lead to an assignment at 3M Company in St. Paul. In recent years he and his students have been active in obtaining gift process control computers and programming them to enhance the operation of the college's fountain, Máquina.

Throughout his career, he has served various funding agencies as an educational and scientific consultant in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China and Pakistan. His first travel venture in retirement took him and his wife Sandi to China for a ten-day visit as guests of the Instrument Society of China and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. The Marleaus plan to visit other universities and labs where he has consulted.

Marleau continuously provides his students with a sense of how the technology introduced and stressed in his courses will serve high-tech industry in the United States and around the world. During the first year of his official retirement he will continue as an instructor in the department.

John A. Tataronis (19K JPG)

The contributions that Professor John A. Tataronis, made before his retirement this spring show no signs of subsiding. Now, he will spend time writing books that reflect his significant research in the areas of plasma physics and nonlinear optics.

Tataronis, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, is interested in excitation, stability and interactions of waves. During his 20 years at the university, Tataronis explored wave phenomena that can modify properties of wave media. New wave effects appear through these modifications. His plasma research, which addressed linear and nonlinear plasma dynamics in a variety of geometrical configurations, has applications in thermonuclear plasmas and space plasma physics. Among Tataronis' important discoveries is an innovative way to heat plasmas; his technique, AlfvŠn Wave Heating, is employed in many national and international research laboratories.

Tataronis' optics research included forays into the effectiveness of plasmas and photorefractive materials to produce phase conjugate images of transient and pulsed optical signals at high speeds. His phase conjugation research, an area of nonlinear optics that has experienced considerable growth in recent years, led to new advances in theoretical modeling of material dynamics in the presence of optical signals.