William J. Burke completed his doctoral dissertation "A Theoretical Investigation of Small-Scale Auroral Zone Electric Fields" at MIT under Vytenis M. Vasyliunas in 1971. He did post-doctoral research at Rice U. on the lunar plasma environment and on microwave emissions from natural surfaces at NASA/JSC. In 1975 he came to the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory where he has worked on the analysis of plasma and field measurements taken by instruments on the INJUN 5, ISIS 1, S3-2, SCATHA, DMSP, DE and CRRES satellites as well as the STS 3, 46, and 75 shuttle missions. He also participated in the analysis of data from the beam-emitting sounding rockets BERT, ECHO 7, MAIMIK and CHARGE 2B. He has recently been involved in the analysis of data retrieved during geomagnetically active periods by CRRES, POLAR and GEOTAIL, and during electrodynamic tether experiments of the TSS 1 and TSS 1R missions. He has authored/coauthored about 200 scientific papers and was selected to be a fellow of the Air Force Research Laboratory.