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Dennis Goodman
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I began college after W-L, but I didn't last a semester. My parents told me not to come home, but they relented long enough to permit me to pack, then enlist. The U.S. Army was pleased to provide me with an attitude adjustment. After the service I studied my way across the country: Maryland, then Michigan, and, finally, a PhD from Cal Berkeley. I began work at the Naval Research Lab in DC and attended Cal on an NRL fellowship. I returned to Virginia fully intending to stay, but my wife---we met in Berkeley---missed California, So, I took a job at the University of California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and returned to the Bay Area in 1977.

I led the Imaging Sciences Group at Livermore, and I worked in many disciplines including astronomy, medicine, nondestructive evaluation for manufacturing, nuclear imaging, test-ban treaty verification, and defense surveillance and tracking. I received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 1978 prize for best paper in Circuits and Systems, and an R&D 100 award for a significant technical innovation in the year 2000. During my career at Livermore I made several forays into academia. These included teaching a couple of times at Davis and Berkeley, serving as a professor at Purdue for two years, and working at the UC Irvine Medical School for a year. After I retired in 2002, I taught engineering at the University of the Pacific. I currently consult at an extremely low level-of-effort.

My first marriage was a good one, but my wife passed away in 1998 after a nine year battle with cancer. I took the loss very hard, and I spent several years in an emotional wilderness. I have one daughter who is 29. After several years teaching middle school Spanish, she decided to change careers, and she returned to college last year. I think she plans to eclipse her dad's record for protracted education. My mom has lived in the same house in McLean for fifty years and is doing amazingly well. Despite being a native Californian, she has no desire to move west. Consequently, my brother and I visit DC frequently.

I have been happily remarried since 2006, and we are enjoying retirement. We are exploring Northern California by car, bicycle, and foot. We also travel afar: we are off to Spain immediately after the reunion. The picture shows us enjoying the sunset outside of Kimo's on Maui. Previous Maui trips were hassle-filled work affairs involving all-nighters at 10K feet on Haleakala suffering from sleep and oxygen deprivation while trying to make some idiot imaging device on a telescope work before viewing time expired. Retirement is good!
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