Jonathan S. Friedman received his Ph.D. from Colorado State University in 1991 and is currently the Director of the Puerto Rico Photonics Institute, which he founded in 2011 at the Universidad Ana G. Mendez. For twenty six years, he was a research associate at the Arecibo Observatory for Cornell University, and at SRI International. In addition to developing and employing lidar technology to study the atmosphere, he has also published extensively in the field of lidar science and spectroscopic physics.