Leon Sibul

In 2003, the Penn State Sailing Club renamed their training grounds "The Sibul Sailing Center", after the long-time faculty adviser. (Sibul had been with the club since 1974.)

He earned a Master in Electrical Engineering degree from New York University in 1963. In 1964 he started working for Pennsylvania State University’s Applied Research Laboratory, receiving his Ph.D. from Penn State in 1968. While at ARL he conducted fundamental and applied signal processing research and development for undersea weapons guidance and control, sonar systems and other Navy applications. He was a pioneer in applying signal processing to underwater systems’ guidance and control.

After his military service, he attended George Washington University and graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Electrical engineering degree. From 1960 to 1964 he was employed at Bell Labs, working on an electronic switching system, as well as on Telstar, the communication satellite credited with ushering in the era of satellite communications.

Leon Sibul was born in Võru, Estonia. In 1944 he fled his native country under the threat of Russian occupation of Estonia, which lasted more than 50 years. He escaped to a refugee camp in Augsburg, Germany where he attended high school. In 1949, he emigrated to the U.S. and lived in the Washington DC area. A veteran of the U.S. Air Force, he served from 1953 to 1957 as an electronic and radio technician.

Leon H. Sibul (August 30, 1932 – February 19, 2007) was with Pennsylvania State University’s Applied Research Laboratory from 1964 to 2002, where he retired as a senior scientist and professor of acoustics.