Dr. Scott Best is an accomplished electromagnetic engineering executive, scientist, consultant, and technical leader whose career spans more than 50 years across RF, microwave, millimeter-wave, antenna, radar, communications, medical, defense, industrial, and advanced technology applications. Throughout his career, he has built a reputation for addressing technically complex problems that resist conventional solutions, combining first-principles engineering, computational electromagnetic modeling, laboratory measurement, and decades of practical field experience. His professional philosophy is grounded in a simple but powerful principle: deep technical knowledge creates its greatest value when it can be applied to help organizations reduce risk, control cost, improve performance, and bring better systems successfully into the field.
Today, Dr. Best serves as Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of SiberSci, LLC, an electromagnetic engineering consulting firm providing specialized expertise to organizations confronting demanding RF, microwave, millimeter-wave, antenna, heating, plasma, and electromagnetic engineering challenges. Through SiberSci, he has worked with clients on research and development, feasibility studies, prototype development, failure analysis, reverse engineering, manufacturing improvement, cost reduction, laboratory development, safety, and product commercialization. His role extends well beyond technical analysis. He evaluates prospective engagements, develops technical and commercial proposals, negotiates contracts, provides executive leadership, communicates program progress to clients, and determines whether an opportunity genuinely aligns with the firm’s competencies—a disciplined approach that reflects his commitment to integrity as much as engineering excellence.
The breadth of Dr. Best’s expertise is exceptional, extending across a working spectrum from extremely low frequencies through 300 GHz. His capabilities encompass RF engineering, antenna engineering, microwave and millimeter-wave systems, radar, electromagnetic analysis, RF and microwave heating, plasma engineering, communication systems, computational electromagnetic simulation, material characterization, laboratory testing, and RF and microwave safety. His work integrates theoretical engineering with hands-on measurement and validation using sophisticated instrumentation, antenna ranges, anechoic chambers, near-field ranges, and industry-leading simulation environments. This combination enables him not simply to model how a system should perform, but to investigate why actual hardware behaves differently and determine what must change to achieve reliable performance.
His consulting record illustrates the commercial value of that approach. Dr. Best has provided technical leadership on advanced radar systems, phased arrays, MIMO radar, millimeter-wave receivers, medical ablation technology, RFID systems, software-defined radio, microwave heating systems, plasma systems, communications technologies, and high-frequency antenna designs. In one manufacturing cost-reduction program involving 24 GHz and 35 GHz radar technology, his redesign of a quadrature mixer using flip-chip Schottky diodes contributed to more than $40,000 per month in manufacturing savings, while new inspection methodologies eliminated approximately 80 percent of scrap and rework. In another high-volume application, he helped develop near-field quality-control antennas supporting UHF RFID security products requiring delivered defect rates below 0.1 percent. These achievements reflect a recurring theme throughout his career: solving the engineering problem while simultaneously understanding its implications for manufacturing, economics, quality, and organizational risk.
Before co-founding SiberSci, Dr. Best served as Chief Scientist at MPD, Inc., where he provided executive technical leadership across vacuum electron devices, RF and microwave circuits, ceramic seal assemblies, spectroscopy, microfabrication, security technologies, and medical applications. He was brought into an environment containing significant manufacturing and performance challenges and helped rebuild critical product lines from first principles. By reviewing assembly practices, documentation, materials, dimensions, tolerances, inspection standards, failure mechanisms, and yield performance, he helped restore manufacturing discipline and dramatically improve first-pass yield. A magnetron product line that had fallen to approximately 10 percent first-pass yield was ultimately restored to approximately 90 percent, while underlying design and process defects were identified and corrected.
His leadership at MPD also demonstrated his ability to connect established engineering capabilities with emerging commercial opportunities. Dr. Best provided technical leadership for investigations into new products and markets spanning X-ray tubes, medical RF and microwave ablation, breath-analysis technologies, RF and microwave amplifiers and oscillators, plasma-processing equipment, dielectric heating systems, and piezoelectric devices. This ability to move between fundamental science, product development, manufacturing, and market opportunity has remained one of the defining characteristics of his career. Rather than viewing engineering as an isolated technical discipline, he approaches it as a strategic capability that can influence product feasibility, capital decisions, quality, competitive positioning, and long-term business performance.
Dr. Best’s academic foundation reinforces the depth of his practical experience. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1996, concentrating in vacuum electronics, plasma physics, RF and microwave engineering, antenna engineering, and electromagnetics. His professional scholarship includes peer-reviewed and industry publications addressing RF MEMS, microwave engineering, periodic circuits, waveguides, and vacuum electronics, as well as contributions to technical reference literature. He is also the holder or co-holder of three United States patents and has contributed extensively to technical documentation, analyses, reports, and client work throughout his career. His professional affiliations include Life Senior Member status with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, along with longstanding participation in IEEE technical societies and the Industrial Microwave Power Institute.
Knowledge transfer is equally important to Dr. Best’s professional identity. He has trained engineers, technicians, staff members, and corporate audiences on highly technical subjects, including RF and microwave engineering and safety. Comfortable communicating with audiences ranging from hands-on technical personnel to senior executives, he is able to translate sophisticated electromagnetic concepts into information that supports practical decisions. His public speaking and training activities reflect a conviction that expertise should not remain confined to one individual; it should strengthen the capabilities of the people and organizations around that individual. His planned participation in the International Microwave Power Institute community further reflects his continued commitment to education, technical safety, and professional engagement.
As a prospective board or advisory leader, Dr. Best brings a perspective shaped by five decades of technological change. He has witnessed the evolution of electromagnetic engineering from earlier analytical and laboratory methodologies to modern computational simulation, advanced materials, additive manufacturing, software-defined systems, and increasingly sophisticated RF and millimeter-wave applications. More importantly, he has continually adapted alongside those changes. His experience enables him to recognize when emerging technologies create genuine opportunities, when engineering assumptions require greater scrutiny, and when a proposed solution may carry hidden technical, manufacturing, cost, safety, or execution risks.
Dr. Best is particularly interested in contributing to organizations involved in communication systems, radar applications, medical physics, physics-driven technologies, and other technically sophisticated industries where his multidisciplinary experience can create meaningful value. He is open to organizations of varying sizes and stages of development, recognizing that complex engineering and strategic challenges are not exclusive to either large enterprises or emerging companies. His value to a board is therefore not limited to one technology or market. He brings an ability to challenge assumptions constructively, evaluate feasibility before significant capital is committed, identify technical and operational risks, and help leadership teams distinguish between an attractive concept and an executable solution.
At the heart of Dr. Best’s interest in board service is a desire to share knowledge accumulated through decades of solving problems in laboratories, manufacturing environments, research programs, client engagements, and commercial systems. Much of that knowledge cannot be fully captured in textbooks, reference manuals, simulations, or corporate procedures because it has been developed through repeated exposure to real-world successes and failures. He believes this experience can help companies avoid preventable mistakes, reduce development and manufacturing risk, make better-informed technology decisions, and accelerate the path from concept to reliable implementation. For Dr. Best, board service represents an opportunity to transform a lifetime of technical experience into institutional knowledge that benefits leadership teams, engineers, customers, shareholders, and future generations of innovators.
Beyond his formal professional responsibilities, Dr. Best maintains an active interest in radar systems, drones, electromagnetic technologies, and the continuing evolution of RF and microwave engineering. His intellectual curiosity has remained constant throughout a career defined by technological change. That curiosity, coupled with a disciplined respect for evidence, measurement, and engineering fundamentals, allows him to approach emerging challenges without losing sight of the principles that determine whether a technology will ultimately perform as promised.
Dr. Best’s career ultimately represents the intersection of scientific rigor, practical engineering, executive judgment, and service to others. He understands that successful innovation requires more than an elegant design; it requires feasibility, validation, manufacturability, reliability, safety, disciplined execution, and clear communication among technical and business stakeholders. Whether advising an engineering team struggling with an elusive performance problem, helping leadership evaluate an emerging technology, improving a manufacturing process, or contributing at the board level, he brings the same objective: apply experience thoughtfully so that organizations can make better decisions, reduce unnecessary risk, and turn complex technical possibilities into sustainable results.
Character:
Dr. Best demonstrates integrity through a disciplined commitment to technical truth, realistic expectations, and a willingness to decline work when it falls outside his core competencies rather than overpromise results. His dedication to teaching, mentoring, and sharing five decades of hard-earned experience reflects a professional philosophy centered on responsibility, continuous learning, and creating value for others.
Knowledge:
With more than 50 years of professional experience, Dr. Best possesses extraordinary depth across RF, microwave, millimeter-wave, antenna, radar, electromagnetic, plasma, medical, communications, and manufacturing technologies. His combination of theoretical understanding, computational modeling, laboratory expertise, product development, and real-world troubleshooting gives him knowledge that extends from fundamental physics through commercialization and production.
Strategic:
Dr. Best consistently connects engineering decisions with their broader implications for cost, feasibility, manufacturing yield, capital investment, schedule, quality, safety, and organizational risk. His board-level value lies in his ability to examine complex technologies critically, identify hidden impediments early, and help organizations direct resources toward solutions with a stronger probability of technical and commercial success.
Communication:
An experienced technical communicator who is comfortable engaging engineers, technicians, clients, executives, and professional audiences on highly sophisticated subjects. His ability to explain complex engineering principles in practical terms enables stakeholders to understand risks, evaluate alternatives, and make better-informed decisions.
