Charles R. Husbands was born in Philadelphia, PA, on April 19, 1935. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1960. He received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Newark College of Engineering, Newark, New Jersey, in 1964, and the M.S. degree in engineering management from Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, in 1973.

From 1960 to 1964, he was employed at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked on the development of phased array antenna designs for radar systems. In 1964, he joined the AC Electronics Division of General Motors where he worked on the integration of the computer and inertial components of the Apollo program. From 1968 to 1973, he was employed by the Raytheon Company in Bedford, Massachusetts, in the development of large-scale computer simulation efforts.

He joined The MITRE Corporation in 1973, where he has worked on a variety of communications system design tasks. This work has included avionics data busses, local area networks, low data rate speech transmission and for the last eighteen years fiber optic communications. The fiber optic tasking has included long haul transmission networks, fiber optic local area networks, avionics data busses, antenna remoting, calibration and timing distribution networks, and participation in a number of independently funded research programs. Much of his most recent research efforts have been in the area of all-optical-networks and techniques for implementing low cost, high data rate WDM networks.

He is currently a Lead Engineer in the Optical Communications and Photonics area responsible for applying fiber optic technology to distributed network problems.