Jay McDaniel

Dr. Jay McDaniel received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Kansas State University of Manhattan, KS, in 2013, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas of Lawrence, KS, in 2015, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma of Norman, OK, in 2018. His research interests include space-illuminated passive bistatic radar; spaceborne / airborne synthetic aperture radar for defense and remote sensing applications; RF/microwave passive component design and integration; radar cross section measurement techniques in cluttered environments; multi-sensor fusion techniques for position, navigation, and timing applications; and distributed coherent radar sensor networks.
From 2015 to 2016, he was a Radar Systems Engineer with the Department of Energy’s Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC), where he also served as an RF/Microwave expert for several plant-driven research and development (PDRD) projects. In August 2018, he joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Oklahoma as an Assistant Professor and conducted research out of the Advanced Radar Research Center’s (ARRC’s) Radar Innovations Laboratory (RIL). His research was supported by Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), the National Security Campus (NSC), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and industry partners. In July 2024, he joined Capella Space where he eventually became the director of the mission architecture and sensor systems group. In April 2026, he became a founding engineer at Assym, Inc. and currently serves as the head of radar.
Dr. McDaniel is currently serving as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Radar Systems (T-RS), the Microwave Theory and Technologies Society (MTT-S) representative on the IEEE T-RS steering committee, and on the MTT-S technical committee 24 (TC-24) focused on “Microwave/mm-wave Radar, Sensing, and Array Systems”. He is a recipient of several awards, including the meritorious Richard K. Moore Best Master’s Thesis Award at the University of Kansas in 2015, the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2022, and the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award in 2023.