Austin Richards is a managing partner of prufentronik LLC, makers of ultraviolet corona discharge sensors. He is also a consultant to the defense and aerospace industry, specializing in infrared, ultraviolet and low-light imaging and was a research scientist at FLIR Systems for 21 years. He is a Fellow of SPIE, a named inventor on 30 US patents, and the author of numerous papers and articles on imaging technology, as well as the SPIE monograph Alien Vision: Exploring the Electromagnetic Spectrum with Imaging Technology (2nd ed. 2011). Dr. Richards holds a PhD in astrophysics from UC Berkeley and did postdoctoral fellowships at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Stockholm. and field research at the South Pole station in Antarctica before leaving academia for industry.