Dr. Matt Markel has excelled in leadership, engineering, and technology and product development in both the defense and commercial sectors. His insights are sought after by numerous groups, and he is a dynamic and engaging speaker, and uses his background coupled to break very complex topics down and explain them in a way we all can understand. Currently he is the CEO of Spartan Radar Inc., a radar technology company that makes better radars and radars better. In addition, he is consulting and promoting his book, Radar for Fully Autonomous Driving, the seminal and definitive resource for making radars that help bring the dream of self-driving cars to a reality. He is an active investor, entrepreneur, and corporate advisor.
Dr. Markel created and led the radar division of Ghost Autonomy, an autonomous driving company using breakthroughs in collision avoidance technology to develop safe, attention-free self-driving for mass market consumer cars. Prior to Ghost, he led the radar team at Waymo, formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project. His radar department designed and delivered multiple generations of indigenously designed tracking and imaging radars to Waymo’s self-driving fleet. He developed the radar research and development framework that has provided numerous cutting-edge technologies and capabilities to Waymo’s radar product line.
At Raytheon, Dr. Markel was a Principal Engineering Fellow on the Space and Airborne Systems Technical Staff. He served as the Technical Director for Raytheon Advanced Electronic Warfare (EW), has been directly involved in the transition of key radar and EW capabilities to the U.S. military, and has been a Principal Investigator for multiple radar and EW research programs that advanced the state of capability, effectiveness, autonomy, and cognition in U.S. systems.
Prior to Raytheon, he was the chief engineer of a portfolio of proprietary programs in the Air Force Research Laboratory at Eglin Air Force Base. Here he also created and led the very successful Special Programs Threat working Group, an organization chartered to bring together experts from across the Intelligence Centers to assess and project adversary technology and weapon developments.
Dr. Markel is widely recognized as an expert and leader in radar, especially automotive radar for autonomous systems, Technology Readiness Assessments and Technology Readiness Levels (he served on the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) panel of subject matter experts), and electronic warfare. He is the inventor on multiple patents and trade secrets from his time at Raytheon and Waymo, with patents pending from his work at Ghost Autonomy and Spartan Radar.
Current mini-resume: Link