1423 Powhatan St., Suite 1
Alexandria, Virginia 22314
Phone (703) 836-6727
Fax (703) 836-7491
Email: asnehq@navalengineers.org

 

ASNE is the leading professional engineering society for engineers, scientists and allied professionals who conceive, design, develop, test, construct, outfit, operate and maintain complex naval and maritime ships, submarines and aircraft and their associated systems and subsystems.  ASNE also serves the educators who train the professionals, researchers who develop related technology, and students who are preparing for the profession.  Society activities provide support for the U.S. Navy; U.S. Coast Guard; U.S. Marine Corps; U.S. Merchant Marine and U.S. Army.

ASNE is the seventh oldest technical society in the United States.  It was founded in 1888 by a group of naval engineering pioneers, most of them officers of the U.S. Navy's Engineering Corps, who sought a unified approach to their profession in order to make the most of new advances in technology. The purposes of ASNE are:           

  • to advance the knowledge and practice of naval engineering in public and private applications and operations,
  • to enhance the professionalism and well-being of members, and
  • to promote naval engineering as a career field.

For 125 years, the Society’s objectives have been strengthened and preserved to meet the changing needs of a time-honored profession. Today ASNE conducts a variety of technical meetings and symposia, publishes the highly regarded Naval Engineers Journal and a number of other technical proceedings and publications, and fosters professional development and technical information exchange through technical committees, local section activities and cooperative efforts with government organizations and other professional societies.

The Society's annual meeting, ASNE Day, is typically held in February of each year in the Washington, DC, area. The meeting features major addresses by high level industry and government leaders and panel discussions by leading members of the profession.  It also includes presentation and discussion of technical papers on a variety of timely naval engineering topics, presentation of the Society's prestigious annual awards and a large exposition with government and industry exhibits covering the full spectrum of naval engineering technology. ASNE Day is highlighted by the Society’s annual Honors Gala, attended by hundreds of executives and senior managers from both government and industry.

Our website is designed to not only serve our members, but also to support scholars, students and others interested in the varied field of naval engineering.  We welcome your suggestions on ways we can improve your experience. 

Dr. James H. Higbie

Award: Solberg Award
Year: 1987
Recipient:
Dr. James H. Higbie
Reason:
For his significant contribution to naval engineering as set forth in the following CITATION:

In recognition of outstanding contributions to the advancement of the technology of long-range communication links with strategic missile submarines. Dr. James H. Higbie has dedicated himself for over ten years to the development of submarine communications systems and has made significant contributions to the quantum improvements in these systems which have been attained during this period.

In 1983, recognizing the importance and difficulty of maintaining survivable communications to the most survivable portion of the strategic triad, the Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarine, Dr. Higbie, at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, initiated an internal research and development project whose objective was to improve the performance of these critical links in a jamming environment. With unusual insight, Dr. Higbie conceived of a way to optimize the performance of LF/VLF receive systems against general interference. To do this, he had to pioneer a new field, nonlinear adaptive digital signal processing. Within a year, Dr. Higbie had implemented a limited but essential part of his concept in hardware and demonstrated in the laboratory large performance gains against a wide range of jamming techniques. Following these tests, Dr. Higbie developed a more versatile signal processor capable of fully implementing his algorithm, and this was successfully tested with operational Navy receiving systems at the Naval Ocean Systems Center. In 1987, utilizing Dr. Higbie's results, the Navy initiated a program to insert this technology, now called Nonlinear Adaptive Processing (NONAP) into the next generation of Navy LF/VLF receiving systems. With the implementation of the technology developed by Dr. Higbie, receiving systems can adapt to a wide range of jamming signals in real time, making effective jamming of communications by an adversary extremely difficult to achieve.

With the added `robustness' against jamming resulting from Dr. Higbie's invention, there will be fewer operational constraints on operational forces due to communications requirements, thereby enhancing the deterrent capability of the Strategic Missile Submarine Force and adding significantly to the security of the Nation and the Free World. This outstanding contribution to our defense technology makes Dr. Higbie eminently qualified to receive the Solberg Award.