Eric R. Fossum (born October 17, 1957) is an American physicist and engineer known for co-developing the CMOS image sensor. He is currently a professor at Thayer School of Engineering in Dartmouth College. Early years and education Fossum was born and raised in Simsbury, Connecticut and attended public school there. He also spent Saturdays at the Talcott Mountain Science Center in Avon, CT, which he credits for his lifelong interest in science, engineering and mentoring students. He received his B.S. in engineering from Trinity College in 1979, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Yale University in 1984. Academic career Eric R. Fossum was a member of the Electrical Engineering faculty at Columbia University from 1984 to 1990. At Columbia University, he and his students performed research on CCD focal-plane image processing and high speed III-V CCDs. In 1990, Dr. Fossum joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and managed JPL’s image sensor and focal-plane technology research and advanced development. In 2007 he sponsored, in part, the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Robot Contest, aimed at increasing innovation and invention in the world of robotics. He joined the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth in 2010 where he teaches, performs research on the Quanta Image Sensor with his graduate students, and coordinates the Ph.D. Innovation Program. He also serves as Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer. Invention While Fossum was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), then-NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin invoked a plan of "Faster, Better, Cheaper" for NASA Space Science missions. One of the instrument goals was to miniaturize charge-coupled device (CCD) camera systems onboard interplanetary spacecraft. In response, throughout the early 1990s, Fossum, Sunetra Mendis and Sabrina E Kemeny, developed a new CMOS active-pixel sensor (APS) with intra-pixel charge transfer camera-on-a-chip technology. He developed a CMOS sensor with his team at JPL in 1993. The same year, he published an extensive paper broadly defining the active-pixel sensor (APS) and giving a historical overview of the technology [reference needed]. He largely credits the invention of APS technology to the Japanese companies Olympus and Toshiba during the mid-to-late 1980s, noting the former developed the vertical APS structure with NMOS transistors and the latter developed the lateral APS structure with PMOS transistors. His team at JPL were the first to fabricate a practical APS outside of Japan, while making several key improvements to APS technology. The JPL sensor used