Gregory H. Bearman, PhD
ANE Image Principal Gregory H. Bearman, PhD retired from Caltech’s NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2008 after a three-decade varied and interesting career arc.
Although his PhD was in atomic physics, and he started at JPL working in that field, he changed the focus of his work to biomedical imaging and spectroscopy. His lab developed new technologies for imaging spectroscopy, and his interest leaned toward imaging people and their artifacts rather than planets.
Along the way, he was line manager of 20 people; did considerable work in technology transfer and commercialization of novel technologies developed at JPL; was a program manager on air and water quality sensors for the Space Station; and he ran a $10 M national security chemical and bioterror agent sensor program.
Outside of JPL, he started two Caltech-spinoff companies, one that worked with high sensitivity biological and chemical sensors and a second that develops and licenses fast (snapshot) spectral imagers for a variety of applications. He has also consulted for numerous businesses on matters relating to intellectual property, marketing, and product development and acquired considerable experience in intellectual property, some obtained as plaintiff and expert witness in IP negotiations and court proceedings.
Bearman has 13 issued patents, and two of his technologies have received R&D 100 Innovation awards as one of the best inventions of the year. He invented, along with Scott Fraser and Rusty Lansford at Caltech, the Zeiss META spectral imager, now widely considered a must when acquiring a confocal microscopy system.
He has been a visiting scientist at St. Luke’s Hospital in Houston and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and has an adjunct appointment in the Ophthalmology Department at the USC Keck School of Medicine. Another academic affiliation is as visiting researcher at the Beckman Laser Institute at the University of California-Irvine. In 2011 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University and will make another Fulbright visit to Hebrew University as a program specialist in 2014. He was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Biomedical for 13 years and for many years was an organizer of the annual SPIE conference on Biomedical Imaging Spectroscopy.
20 years ago, as part of a technology outreach program at JPL, he began applying electronic and spectral imaging to archeology, and he has been involved with the Israel Antiquities Authority in one capacity or another over much of that time. He also has worked on a number of World Cultural Heritage objects with institutions including the British Library, the Huntington Library and most notably, with the IAA on the Dead Sea Scrolls. At present, he is technology and imaging consultant to the IAA, currently imaging and publishing online all of the scrolls; see at http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/.
The IAA/Leon Levy Digital Dead Sea Scroll Library has embarked on a project to monitor the conservation state of the scrolls through imaging; the approaches being developed as part of that project are widely applicable to cultural heritage in general.
At present, his interests include projects to apply new imaging technologies to cultural heritage objects for monitoring their condition and managing sites and citizen science, using mobile phone cameras to provide an image database. The citizen science project is being setup at sites in SE Asia, through a collaboration with the City University of Hong Kong. He is working in collaboration with the Georgia O'Keefe Museum to develop reflectance transformation imaging as a monitoring tool.
Dr. Bearman an effective proposal writer, speaker and advocate, having presented at the executive level in the Federal Government.
Dr. Bearman has over 100 publications and many of them can be found at https://independent.academia.edu/GregBearman