John A. DeSanto (M'81) was born on May 25, 1941, in Wilkes-Barre, PA. He received the B.S. degree in physics (magna cum laude) and the M.A. degree in mathematics from Villanova University, Villanova, PA, in 1962. In 1963 and 1967 he received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His thesis was in elementary particle physics. While at Michigan he held Woodrow Wilson and National Science Foundation Fellowships.He joined the Acoustics Division of the Naval Research Laboratory after graduate school and worked on the scattering and propagation of scalar, electromagnetic, and elastic waves. He was an exchange scientist at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, Teddington, U.K., in 1974 and 1975. From 1978 to 1981 he was a member of the Environmental Science Division of NRL working on direct and inverse scattering problems applied to the ocean, and in methods of remote sensing of oceanographic variability. He joined Electro Magnetic Applications, Inc., in Denver in 1981, and became a Research Professor of Mathematics at the University of Denver in 1982. He is presently a Research Professor of Mathematics at the Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO. His principle work has been on the theoretical and computational description of scattering from periodic and random rough surfaces. In addition, he has made many contributions to the theory of oceanic sound propagation and scattering from multilayered bodies. His current research interest include oceanic inversion and remote sensing problems.
Dr. DeSanto has coedited a book on scattering theory and edited the book Ocean Acoustics, which has been translated into Russian. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and a member of the American Physical Society, Commission B of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and Sigma Xi.