Karen Burnham of EMC United, Inc.

Biography:

Karen Burnham has worked in the aerospace, defense, and automotive industries since 1996. She has specialized in EMC Engineering since 2011 and started EMC United in 2024. Previous to that she spent time working on project management for EMA in Denver, and doing vehicle testing and troubleshooting for Ford Motor Company, both on traditional gas vehicles and also newer Hybrid Electric vehicles. Earlier she worked as an EMI Test Director at Northrop Grumman's Environmental Test Lab near Baltimore, MD, focusing on MIL-STD-461 testing. Prior to that she was the Lead EMC engineer for the Dream Chaser space vehicle being built by the Sierra Nevada Corporation for crew transport to the International Space Station. 

She has worked as EMC lead on the NASA side for the European Service Module that will accompany the Orion spacecraft. Her specialty at NASA was in aerospace pyrotechnic systems, and she has conducted extensive research into the RF and lightning susceptibility of NASA Standard Initiators. She is familiar with requirements generation, verification and validation, systems engineering, and test plans.

She is an iNARTE certified Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Engineer and IEEE Senior Member. She received a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Houston and a Bachelor's degree in Physics from Northern Arizona University. She was elected to the IEEE EMC Society Board of Directors in 2020 and in 2021 was appointed both the Assistant Vice President of Standards and also a Distinguished Lecturer.

She has team leadership experience on programs up to $1.5M and team sizes up to 10, combining leadership and unusually strong communication skills (writing articles and book reviews for various magazines, publishing a book from an academic press) with technical skills revolving around the E3 field. Her experience includes EMC troubleshooting, antennas, testing, requirements development and verification, transmission lines, simulation and modeling.

Specialties: Electromagnetic Environmental Effects, EMC noise in electric vehicles, Systems Engineering, Communication with non-specialists, MIL-STD-461 testing, CISPR 12, 16, 25, 36 testing, automotive component-level issues, MIL-STD-461/464 requirements tailoring