Peter Love

Instructor

Email: plove1@pipeline.sbcc.edu

Peter Love was born in Toronto, Ontario Canada and raised in the middle of nowhere in central Arizona. At 12 years of age, he moved with his family to Corona del Mar in southern California and fell enamored with the ocean.  Surfing and other water sports were his favorite “fun” activities and remained so for years.  After graduating from Corona del Mar High School, Peter attended the University of California, San Diego and earned a BA degree in Physics.  He spent his junior year abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he learned to kayak surf on the North Sea.  After graduating from UCSD, he took a year off and travelled across the country in his $400 VW bug with his 10-speed bicycle.  After some rumination about what to do next with his life, he ended up applying to graduate schools in Physics.  He eventually earned his PhD in Solid State Physics from another UC campus, the University of California at Santa Barbara.  After a brief post-doctoral hiatus at the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, California, Peter moved back to Santa Barbara and started working at what was then Hughes Aircraft’s Santa Barbara Research Center (SBRC).  A 25-year long career ensued at SBRC, with Peter working his way up from semiconductor materials testing and characterization to infrared detector engineering and finally, to Focal Plane Array (FPA) systems engineering.  In 1999, Peter started working on the mid-infrared detectors for the MIRI instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).  He was extremely gratified and relieved to see the successful launch of JWST on Christmas Day of 2021.  Meanwhile, he became an Engineering Fellow at SBRC, now Raytheon Vision Systems, before retiring from RVS in December of 2006.  Next came consulting part time at Acumen Scientific, a small local company established by colleagues from SBRC.  After retiring from Acumen in 2016, Peter has enjoyed hiking and biking, travelling with his partner, and maintaining several rental properties. He also entertains himself by solving physics and math problems just for fun as well as trying to keep up with the latest developments in physics, technology, astronomy and astrophysics and cosmology.