Mike Polehn grew up on a large Cherry orchard in The Dalles Oregon, learning the full Cherry trade from pruning, running chainsaw, mowing with large tractors, spaying, etc, to smoothly running large 100 to 120 person harvest crews. Financed, managed, and ran orchard 1 crop year, however engineering interests prevailed.
Mike attended Oregon State University (OSU) and received a BSEE in Electrical and Computer Engineering where most of the electives were engineering classes since he fully paid for collage himself , didn't want to waste money on low value classes. Mike's primary objective was learning as much as possible, rather than focuses on grades, since knowledge and ability is the real value and there is a tradeoff between retained knowledge and getting good grades. In work, Mike strives to become very knowledgeable and seek expert level skill levels. Outside work, Mike continues ongoing effort of learning of new engineering and science information. After over 30 years of ongoing effort, Mike has accumulated considerable skills in hardware, software, and algorithm design.
Mike's first engineering job was for Boeing Aerospace where his focus was on infrared sensor signal processing, algorithm development, harsh noise mitigation, target detection, extensive simulations, working on government contracts, designing and building high throughput signal processing prototypes, and delivering and setting up the prototypes in government test facilities, which always robustly worked as expected.
Although the infrared algorithm development and hardware work that had produced quality signal processor prototypes, sensor system studies, and expert government consulting that improved Boeing's infrared system capability and credibility and helped Boeing land some major contracts, Mike left Boeing and pursued other engineering work. Later contacting work circled around back to an infrared camera work which used the next generation of infrared detectors that had been used by one of the projects that Mike had been worked on at Boeing. This allowed Mike to get in and evaluate, resolve some complex problems, and do tuning of the military asset infrared camera used in the U2 reconnaissance airplane, that was extensively in some of the recent military actions.
This extensive knowledge and experience has put Mike in the position for excellent insight into new engineering and product development possibilities.