Clara Rivero Baleine is an expert in infrared materials/transparent ceramics, optical coatings, gradient index (GRIN) optics, and metamaterials. She has been with Lockheed Martin since 2005 and has held various positions of increasing responsibility.
As a Fellow at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, Clara is responsible for trade secrets and licensing agreements that drive competitive advantage in key technology sectors.
For the past 15+ years, Clara has conducted innovative research leading to advanced infrared windows, GRIN optics, low-cost meta-optics, and high-performance coatings.
Her ongoing research is focused on developing processes for hardening broadband windows, validating durable broadband coatings with higher transmission, and developing reconfigurable optics and wide field-of-view meta-optics designs for next-generation platforms.
Her contributions have earned her numerous awards, including the Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control Technical Innovation Award, the Lockheed Martin Corporation NOVA Award for Technical Innovation, the Missiles and Fire Control 2007 and 2016 Excellence Awards, the Outstanding AlumKnights Award from The University of Central Florida in 2015, and the Distinguished Alumni Award from CREOL in 2019.
Along with her accolades, Clara was recognized as a Women of Color Technology All Star in 2009. Her focus areas include discovering and implementing innovative technologies in advanced windows, GRIN optics and coatings, and metamaterial research.
She has successfully linked nanotechnology fabrication approaches to optical thin film coating fabrication processes, creating higher performance wide field of view (W-FOV) anti-reflective (AR) coatings.
These coatings continue to show superior improvements over traditional coating materials and technologies, leading to multiple patent applications and development activities within and outside Lockheed Martin.
As a senior member of Optica, Clara has held numerous roles in the organization, including serving as the Optical Materials topical editor for the Applied Optics journal for three years. She has also been a standing committee member for the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) International Defense and Commercial Sensing Symposia for over eight years.
Clara is also the Optics/CREOL Dean’s External Advisory Board Chair at the University of Central Florida, where she plays a significant role in developing and mentoring graduate and undergraduate students.
She has recruited top UCF and CREOL students to work within the Applied Research Labs as part of the Lockheed Martin-UCF College Work Experience (CWEP) program, and several of her students have joined the ranks of Lockheed Martin across the Corporation.
In 2019, Clara approached leadership with a request to serve as a “formal manager” in the organization to develop the future path of early career engineers, and she has been highly successful in creating the future talent of their teams.
