About HLS

A little bit about the company... HLS Research was founded on September 16, 2004 as an employee-owned California C-Corporation. Our staff has done basic and applied research work in a variety of areas including fiber optics, hyperthermia (using sound to generate heat in tumors), transducer modeling, electromagnetic wave propagation and scattering. There's your heat and light from our company name, if you were wondering.

However, the vast majority of our work is in underwater acoustics with applications to ocean acoustic tomography (imaging ocean features such as fronts and eddies), marine mammal tracking, acoustic scattering by mines, passive and active SONAR, bottom-mapping and imaging sediment layers (geoacoustic inversion). The support of this research requires skills in modeling the propagation of sound in the ocean channel, as well as sophisticated signal processing methods to extract faint sounds from a noisy background. Read in more detail about some of these projects elsewhere on our web site...

Our work is "vertically-integrated" meaning that we do everything from the basic research (with results published in journals) to systems-oriented studies. Perhaps 80% of our work is in the so-called 6.1 and 6.2 categories (basic and applied research).

Currently most of our funding comes from the U.S. Office of Naval Research. However, the work of our staff has been sponsored by a variety of agencies or institutions including DARPA, SPAWAR, and NSF. Our work involves a mixture of activities including theoretical, computational, and experimental work, with typically several experiments at sea per year.

HLS Research is employee-owned with no external ownership. Thus, the stockholders are motivated to think a bit more deeply about employee needs, rather than simply short-term profit. Meanwhile, the employees are vested in the overall success of the company. This is the Beyster model which we enthusiastically adopt.

P.S. We don't do building air conditioning, heating, or lighting (at least professionally).