Mark Butala

Mark D. Butala is a Visiting Research Scientist in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received his H.B.E.E. degree with distinction from the University of Delaware in 2002, graduating summa cum laude, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UIUC in 2004 and 2010, funded in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, UIUC Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Fellowship, UIUC Computational Science and Engineering Program Fellowship, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratories Graduate Fellowship. From 2010 to 2016, he was a member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, receiving several NASA Group Achievement Awards. His research interests include the theory of remotely sensed image formation, Monte Carlo and statistical signal processing theory and practice, and the application of rigorous Bayesian methodology to big data problems in space science.