The University of Texas at Austin
College of Engineering

Spring 2008 Alumni Spotlight:
Clint Slatton, BS ASE 1993, MS ASE 1997

I started at the University of Texas in the fall of 1988. As an undergraduate student in Aerospace Engineering, I started working with Professor Roy Craig in structures. I helped write and solve homework and example problems for his book on Structural Analysis.

Later, I moved over to the space flight track and took my electives in orbital mechanics. I co-op’ed with the American Airlines turbine engine facility in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1990 and 1991, and then with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1993. I graduated with my Bachelor of Science in fall of 1993 with “High Honors”.

I went straight into the Master of Science degree program in the spring of 1994 after my Bachelor’s degree. While pursuing my MS in ASE, I worked at the Center for Space Research (CSR). Professor Byron Tapley was my advisor, and Melba Crawford (now at Purdue) was my co-advisor. I interned at JPL again in 1994 and 1998. For my thesis research, I started working on remote sensing problems (simulating radar scatter from landscapes). As I neared the end of my Master’s degree, two major things occurred. First, I got married to Ms. Jennifer Coleman (now Jennifer Slatton), a UT alumna (Psychology, BA 1997). Second, I realized that aside from the orbit and attitude determination, my topic of remote sensing was mostly an electrical engineering problem (signal processing and electromagnetic scattering).

After receiving my MS in ASE, I switched over to electrical engineering. I remained in Austin and simply started graduate school in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in the fall of 1997. I kept Melba Crawford as my primary advisor, and Professor Brian Evans in ECE became my co-advisor. In spring of 1999, I received a non-thesis MS degree in ECE and entered PhD candidacy. Our first child (William Slatton) was born in November, 2000. I graduated from ECE in fall of 2001 with my PhD. My dissertation research was on fusing radar and laser images of the ground and inverting them to estimate vegetation heights.

I stayed on at CSR as a post-doc and an adjunct professor at UT. I taught an undergraduate course in the ECE Dept. It was their linear systems course, although they have a different title for it than the equivalent course in ASE. In spring of 2003, I interviewed at the University of Florida (UF) and was hired. Our second child (Emma Slatton) was born in May of 2003. Two and half months later, we moved from our house in Round Rock, Texas to Gainesville, Florida.

Since fall of 2003, I have been at UF with a joint appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Civil and Coastal Engineering (CCE). The connection with CCE is due to the lidar remote sensing facility there. I teach “pure ECE” courses in signal processing and pattern recognition. I also developed and teach multi-disciplinary courses on general remote sensing and lidar-specific remote sensing. Our third child (Ryan Slatton) was born in May, 2005.

I am a Co-Instructor for the NSF Center called the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM). I have funded research from NSF, the US Army (ARO), the US Navy (ONR), USDA, NASA, and industry. This fall, I won the Presidential Early Career Award for Sciences and Engineers (PECASE) award, the highest award given by the United States Government to young faculty. This past October, our fourth child (John Slatton) was born.

To read more about Dr. Slatton’s PECASE award, visit http://insideuf.ufl.edu/2007/12/13/pecase-award

 

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