He started his career in 1980 as a management trainee with the National Dairy Development Board, Anand, India. A year later, he joined Milma, a state government marketing cooperative for the dairy industry, Thiruvananthapuram, as a planning and systems officer. After 15 years at Milma, he joined IBM in Tokyo as Head of Technology Services.
In 2000, he helped found InApp, a company in Palo Alto, California that provides software development services. He served as its CEO and Executive Chairman until his death.
Raja was the 2011-2012 Chair of the IEEE Humanitarian Activities Committee. He wanted to find a way to engage engineers to apply their expertise to develop sustainable solutions that help their local community. To achieve this goal, in 2011 he founded IEEE SIGHT. Today, more than 150 SIGHT groups in 50 countries are working on projects such as sustainable irrigation and photovoltaic systems.
For his efforts, he received the 2015 Larry K. Wilson Transnational Award from the IEEE Member and Geographic Activities. The award recognizes effective efforts to achieve one or more of the MGA’s strategic goals and objectives related to transnational activities.
For the past two years, Rajah has chaired the IEEE Admissions and Advancement Review Committee, which approves new member applications and elevations to higher member ranks.
He was a member of the advisory board of the International Center for Free and Open Source Software. The organization was established by the government of Kerala, India to facilitate the development and distribution of free and open source software. Raja also served on the board of directors of Bedroc, a recruiting and IT support company in Nashville.
He received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1979 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
Donn S. Terry
Software engineer
life member, 74; died September 14
Terry was a computer engineer at Hewlett-Packard in Fort Collins, Colorado for 18 years.
He joined HP in 1978 as a software developer and chaired the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) working group. POSIX is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society to maintain compatibility between operating systems. There he also developed software for the Motorola 68000 microprocessor.
Terry left HP in 1997 to join Softway Solutions, also in Fort Collins, where he developed tools for Interix, a Unix subsystem of the Windows NT operating system. After Microsoft acquired Softway in 1999, he remained a senior software development engineer at its Seattle location. There he worked on static analysis, a method of computer program debugging that involves examining code without running the program. He also helped create SAL, a Microsoft source code annotation language, which was developed to make code design easier to understand and analyze.
Terry retired in 2014. He enjoyed science fiction, boating, cooking and spending time with his family, according to his daughter, Kristin.
He obtained a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1970 and a doctorate. in Computer Science in 1978, both from the University of Washington in Seattle.
William Sandham
signal processing engineer
Senior Life Member, age 70; died August 25
Sandham has applied his signal processing expertise to a wide variety of disciplines, including medical imaging, biomedical data analysis, and geophysics.
He started his career in 1974 as a physicist at the University of Glasgow. While working there, he pursued a doctorate. in geophysics. He graduated in 1981 from the University of Birmingham in England. He then joined the British National Oil Corp. (now Britoil) as a geophysicist.
In 1986, he left to join the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, as a lecturer in the signal processing department. While at university, he published over 200 journal articles and five books dealing with blood glucose measurement, electrocardiography data analysis and compression, medical ultrasound, segmentation of MRI, fitting of prosthetic limbs and detection of sleep apnea.
Sandham left university in 2003 and founded Scotsig, a signal processing research and consultancy firm, also in Glasgow.
He served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Analog and Digital Signal Processing and the EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing.
He was a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and a Fellow of the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers and the Society of Exploration Geophysicists.
Sandham obtained his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1974 from the University of Glasgow.
Stephen M. Brustoski
Loss prevention engineer
life member, 69; died on January 6
For 40 years, Brustoski worked as a loss prevention engineer for the insurance company FM Global. He retired from the company, headquartered in Johnston, RI, in 2014.
He was an elder at his church, CrossPoint Alliance, in Akron, Ohio, where he oversaw administrative work and led Bible studies and prayer meetings. He was an assistant scout leader for 12 years and he enjoyed hiking and traveling the world with his family, according to his wife, Sharon.
Brustoski earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1973 from the University of Akron.
Harry Letaw
President and CEO of Essex Corp.
Senior Life Member, 96; passed away on May 7, 2020
As President and CEO of Essex Corp., Columbia, Maryland, Letaw managed the development and commercialization of optoelectronics and signal processing solutions for defense, intelligence and commercial customers. He retired in 1995.
He had served in World War II as an aeronautical engineer for the US Army. After his release, he received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, then a master’s degree and a doctorate, all from the University of Florida at Gainesville, in 1949, 1951 and 1952.
After graduating, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He left to become a researcher at Raytheon Technologies, an aerospace and defense manufacturer, in Wayland, Mass.
Letaw was a member of the American Physical Society and the honor societies Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi.
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