Inspire Institute, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) organization for scientific research. Our board of directors is comprised of a President, Secretary, Treasurer and Director-at-large as listed below.
President Dr. Attipat Rajagopal
Dr. Rajagopal completed his undergraduate studies in Physics and Mathematics in India and obtained a Master’s degree (1960) for a dissertation on Lattice Vibrations of Zinc Blende, from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Shortly after that, he came to Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, on a Tata Memorial Travel Grant and a Gordon McKay Prize Fellowship, where he obtained a Ph. D. degree (1964) for a thesis on Itinerant Electron Ferromagnetism. Dr. Rajagopal worked at the Naval Research Laboratory from 1985.
Dr. Rajagopal conducts theoretical research on a variety of topics in condensed matter and statistical physics including: magnetic and superconducting properties of metals and alloys including the new high Tc systems, lattice vibrations of metals and superconductors, electron gas theories in 2-D and 3-D, long time relaxation phenomena in complex systems, on nanoelectronic structures and devices, as well as on a new nonequilibrium time-dependent functional theory of condensed matter systems, Tsallis entropy for nonextensive systems and most recently in the areas of quantum entanglement and information theory. Prior to the NRL appointment, he was a Professor of Physics for over a period of two decades, in various universities and research institutes in this country and abroad.
Over the years, Dr. Rajagopal has received numerous awards and published about 325 technical papers, and about a dozen chapters in books on advanced physics, and chemistry series. He has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 1974, and a Fellow of the Washington Academy of Science Academy since 1994. Additionally, he has given over two hundred and fifty invited lectures and seminars at various International conferences, universities and research institutions in the country and abroad.
Secretary Dr. Ronald Rendell
Dr. Rendell received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics (1980) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Rendell has performed basic theoretical research in a variety of areas, including significant contributions to relaxations and transport in complex material systems, transport in electronic materials, plasmonics in nanostructures and metamaterials, quantum information, quantum decoherence and entanglement, and quantum measurement. The concept of the localized surface plasmon originated in Dr. Rendell’s Ph.D. work and which also identified the first experimental observations of these excitations. He later developed theory and modeling of plasmo-photonic nanostructured arrays and protein-based plasmonic nanostructures. Dr. Rendell developed theory in the area of quantum information and entanglement and worked on research projects involving qubits in semiconductor quantum dots, integrated atom optics, and atomic slow light devices. His current research is in the area of Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, specifically on the quantum measurement problem. During 2005-2006, Dr. Rendell was a member of Prof. Yakir Aharonov’s Center for Quantum Studies where he conducted fundamental quantum mechanics research. In 2006 Dr. Rendell was a founding member of Inspire Institute, and is currently on the board of directors. In 2018, Dr. Rendell coauthored with Dr. Michael Steiner the book “The Quantum Measurement Problem”, published by Inspire Institute, Inc.
Treasurer Dr. Michael Steiner
Dr. Steiner received his BSEE (1986) Drexel University, MSEE (1988) and Ph.D. (1994) from the University Of Maryland, College Park. His advanced degrees are in Information Theory. As part of his Ph.D. degree he resolved the long-standing strong simplex conjecture of information theory. As well, he developed the first constructive good code that can reach the capacity of Gaussian noise channels which are typical communication channels of interest. Prior to that, it was only known how to construct explicit good codes on a subclass of discrete channels. Dr. Steiner contributes in the areas of Quantum Information including the theory of entanglement and non-locality. He showed that only a finite amount of information was needed to account for non-local correlations predicted by Bell’s inequality and extended the theory of the robustness of entanglement. His current research is in the area of Foundations of Quantum Mechanics specifically on the measurement problem. During 2005-2007, Dr. Steiner was a member of Prof. Aharonov’s Center for Quantum Studies where he conducted fundamental quantum mechanics research. In 2006 Dr. Steiner was a founding member of Inspire Institute, and is currently on the board of directors. During 2008-2010 Dr. Steiner was a member of the Chapman University Institute for Quantum Studies in the area of fundamental quantum mechanics.
Director-At-Large Dr. Louis Sica
Dr. Louis Sica received his Ph.D. in physics from The Johns Hopkins University. His thesis was concerned with the spatial coherence properties of lasers and thermal sources. He spent his subsequent career at the Naval Research Laboratory, from which he retired in Dec. 2004 with two interludes at the Office of Naval Research. He has investigated a variety of optical problems ranging from nonlinear processes deleterious to laser light propagation to high resolution space imaging using coherence measurements. Many of the problem areas investigated resided in the field of statistical optics. Recently he has been interested in foundational problems of quantum mechanics, particularly problems in the interpretation of Bell’s theorem.