Dr. Leonard A. Ferrari was appointed Provost of the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in July 2006. The Naval Postgraduate School provides relevant and unique masters and doctoral-level education and research programs in order to increase the combat effectiveness of U.S. and allied Armed Forces and to enhance the security of the United States. Since becoming Provost, Dr. Ferrari has spearheaded a new Strategic Plan initiative, proposed new collaborative efforts with regional research and education institutions and launched new efforts to make campus academic and business processes more effective.
Prior to becoming the Provost, Dr. Ferrari was the Dean of Research at NPS with responsibility for oversight of research, grants and contracts, the research activities of the Modeling, Virtual Environments, & Simulations Institute (MOVES), the Cebrowski and Meyer Institutes, policy issues and supervision of sponsored programs, oversight of the NPS Research Initiation Program (RIP) and the development of new research relationships and programs with federal, state and civilian organizations. Under his leadership, sponsored programs grew at a rate of nearly 25% per year. Dr. Ferrari played a lead role in the development of industry and relations with the UC system and several universities in the Washington Capital Region (WCR) as well as strengthened programs and collaborations with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.
Dr. Ferrari has published approximately 100 research articles in electrical engineering and has spent thirty years in academic faculty positions in addition to more than ten years in industrial research and development positions. He was Department Head of the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and later Vice Provost for Special Initiatives and Executive Director of the Institute for Information Technology at Virginia Tech. Prior to that time, he was a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies for the School of Engineering. Dr. Ferrari also has more than ten years of experience in private industry with Bell & Howell and the Polaroid Corporation.
He holds a B.S.E.E. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.S.E.E. from Northeastern University. His Ph.D. degree is from the University of California, Irvine with research work in spatially varying digital filters. Dr. Ferrari’s research is in the areas of signal and image processing, medical imaging systems, computer graphics and multi-media systems. His most recent research is in the area of spline computations for computer graphics and data compression, where he has produced extremely efficient computational procedures. He recently created the 2-5-2 spline, a mathematical basis function suitable for all spline applications that has superior properties and computational advantages over conventional B-splines. Dr. Ferrari and his colleagues have used the new spline algorithms and concepts in the development of low power circuits for high quality computer graphics and data compression in multimedia systems.
