Norman Lay

Norman Lay is the manager of the Communications Architectures and Research Section at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received his BSEE from Columbia University, MSEE from Stanford University and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California. Prior to joining JPL, he was employed at the General Electric Corporate Research and Development Center in Schenectady, NY, where he worked on digital voice compression and land mobile radio technologies. Norm has worked on a broad range of technologies for satellite, terrestrial and deep space communications at JPL. His early work at the lab was focused on the development and demonstration of critical technologies for mobile satellite communications. Norm has also worked extensively on technology development for the Deep Space Network (DSN), where he served as the Network Signal Processing Work Area Manager in the DSN Technology Program and has supervised groups specializing in RF and optical communications signal processing. He has developed specialized communication signal analysis and detection algorithms which have been successfully utilized to support telemetry signal anomaly analysis and recovery of weak signals for missions such as Kepler and STEREO-B. He has also led the development of the DSN Next Generation Advanced Receiver, and has been involved in advancing optical communications ground segment technologies for various NASA optical communications projects.