Laurence C. Palmer was born in Washington D.C. , grew up in Arlington Virginia and graduated from Washington-Lee High School .

He received a BS degree in Physics from Washington and Lee University , Lexington VA and a BEE degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy N.Y. both in 1955. He received the MS and PhD degrees in EE from the University of Maryland , College Park , in 1963 and 1970.

He retired from Engineering at the beginning of 1999 and continues to teach communications, control and signal processing related courses part time in the Professional Masters of Engineering program at the University of Maryland , College Park .

During his career, he held technical and project managerial positions at several organizations all in the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Area: Emerson Research Laboratories/ Radcom-Emertron division of Litton Systems, Silver Spring MD; ITT Intelcom/Computer Sciences Corporation(CSC), Falls Church VA ; Communications Satellite Corporation's COMSAT Laboratories, Clarksburg MD ; and Hughes Network Systems, Germantown , MD.

During 1955-1957 he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Germany as an Electronics Officer in the 15 th Ordinance Battalion.

At Radcom-Emertron, he was a Senior engineer developing airborne electronic equipment for military applications including radar altimeters and fuzing systems.

In 1963 he joined ITT Intelcom/CSC where he conducted survivability studies and developed computer simulations under a systems engineering and technical assistance contract for the early military communications satellite programs. He managed a group conducting projects for DOD and NASA customers dealing with digital signal processing applications.

He joined Comsat Laboratories in 1974 as Principal Scientist in the Communications Technology Division conducting R&D related to several generations of Intelsat satellites. In the late 1970's he served as program manager for Comsat's participation in the DARPA Satnet program to develop and install packet satellite program terminals that connected ARPANET in the U.S. via communications satellite to counterpart networks in Europe . In 1984-1985 he served as systems engineering program manager for Comsat's participation in NASA Lewis Research Center 's Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS) program under contract to RCA. He served on the editorial board of the COMSAT Technical Review.

In 1990 he joined Hughes Network Systems in Germantown Md. where he was Chief Scientist in the Advanced Systems Engineering group. He performed studies and computer simulations for corporate programs including DirecTV and Spaceway, and for outside customers including NASA and Inmarsat's ICO program.

He is a Life Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and served as Chairman of the Washington D.C. section of the Information Theory Society in 1973-1974. He has published in IEEE journals and in the COMSAT Technical Review and also presented papers at international conferences related to communications satellite applications. He taught short courses on satellite communications at Purdue, George Washington University , and Government agencies, and on channel modeling and simulation at the University of Maryland.