About Us - Creative Digital Systems -

About The Principals

Norm Lamarra

Norm Lamarra has a 3-decade technical background in Radar Systems, Signal Processing, real-time software development, Antenna design, digital systems, and System Modeling. He started his career working for a major aerospace company in the UK, moved to the US in 1977, and has worked for a range of smaller businesses until founding his first company in 1989. He has also managed research teams, spending ten years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, working initially on integrated spacecraft design, and later on advanced space network architectures for science gathering (with Tom Vaughan). He left JPL in 2004 to co-found CDSI with Anand Kelkar and Tom Vaughan. His academic background started with Mathematics, and he spent several years doing pre- and post-doctoral work in the Schools of both Engineering and Medicine at UCLA, where he applied modeling and signal-processing principles to the analysis of dynamic physiological systems, spending a short time as Adjunct Faculty there.

Anand Kelkar

During his 30 year career, Anand has been responsible for the development of several products such as Telemetry Systems, Precision Approach Radar Antennas, Synthetic Vision Antenna systems, Vehicle Protection Radar as well as generic Telemetry Systems. Throughout his career, Anand has served as a key technical analyst for the US Army CECOM in Ft. Monmouth, NJ on the Firefinder Artillery and Mortar Locating Radar program. He has assisted in several source selection cycles for the acquisition and upgrade of AN/TPQ-36 & 37 Firefinder Radars. Anand holds several patents that span the fields of Radar Transmitters, Digital Beamforming as well as Electronic Music Distribution. He completed his BEE at Cooper Union in New York and his MSEE at the University of Southern California.

Tom Vaughan

Tom Vaughan has been writing software and leading development teams for over 15 years. He has built many different types of software systems. He has built on-demand movie rental systems, two-factor authentication systems for the web, secure internet proxies, and advanced space-based communication frameworks at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He's also worked at numerous start-ups in The Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle, and now Los Angeles. Tom has been a long-time contributor to many Open Source projects such as Apache and Samba. He first installed GNU/Linux in 1992 and hasn't looked back since. Tom received his Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science from California State University Chico, and is an MBA candidate at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Luc Gravelle

The beginning of Luc's career was focused on theoretical analysis and computer simulations of electromagnetic energy. He has developed codes to represent the energy coupling between multi-layered microstrip lines at ABB in Switzerland. He then worked at Matra-Marconi Space in France to model the effect of lightning on satellite launching pads by developing a time-domain Method-of-Moment simulation tool. With a need for more direct interaction with hardware, Luc moved to California where he worked at Malibu Research on a various projects. The work included plasma antennas, radar simulators (hardware and software), telemetry systems for which Luc developed the codes for over 100 antenna systems (including sea stabilized, video tracking and of course RF tracking). Luc received his M.Sc.A. From the University of Ottawa, Canada in the field of Electromagnetic.