Management Team

ERT has a customer-focused, flexible approach to management in providing services to both state and federal agencies to meet their specific needs.

Our management team has guided the development of ERT to become a vibrant, friendly and fiscally responsible company providing a stimulating working environment for talented scientists, engineers, and technologists to provide quality products and services for our customers.

Our management team consists of:

Dr. Jingli Yang, Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Jingli Yang is one of the founders of ERT. Dr. Yang served as ERT's President from 2001 to 2005 and took the role of Chief Executive Officer in 2006. Under her direction, ERT has expanded its client base to include NASA and NOAA and grown to a company with over 300 employees. Dr. Yang received her Doctoral Degree in Geography and Remote Sensing from the University of Maryland. She has over 20 years of experience in Earth remote sensing, satellite data systems, and information technology. Dr. Yang held progressively responsible technical and management positions in the Earth remote sensing and satellite data systems fields with companies that included Raytheon and Space Imaging. Dr. Yang is a member of Maryland Space Business Round Table Board, American Geophysical Union and American Meteorology Society.

Dr. Peter Li, President

Dr. Peter Li is one of the founders of ERT. Dr. Li has served as ERT's Principal since 1996. Dr. Li took the role of President in 2006. His leadership contributes greatly to ERT's growth from a two-person company to an over 300-employee company. Dr. Li received his doctoral degree in Geophysics from Rutgers University. As a Certified Professional Geologist in Virginia, he has over 20 years of experience in environmental science and engineering, geographic information system application, geotechnical engineering, geophysical survey and hydrogeologic investigation. Prior to his association with ERT, Dr. Li worked as a Project Manager for three environmental and engineering companies. Dr. Li serves as the assistant treasurer of the Society of American Military Engineers, Baltimore Post.

Cathie Meetre, Vice President, Government Services

Cathie Meetre brings a technical background in scientific programming for flight experiments in the Solar Physics and High Energy Astrophysics at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Over a 20-year technical career she developed and flew real-time, space-borne neural networks and contributed to algorithm development for sky tessellations and protocols for spacecraft communications. During this technical career, Cathie also managed successively larger groups of IT professionals culminating in a contract with nearly 100 scientists, engineers and programmers supporting Space and Earth Sciences directorates at Goddard. She is a trained meeting facilitator and the author of a number of publications including technical papers on neural networks and IT Architecture studies.

Business development and proposal management and authorship were natural outgrowths of her business, writing and technical interests, and Cathie continues to specialize in these areas as a major contributor to ERT's growth. In tandem, she also plays the role of transition manager for newly won contracts, combining her experience as a manager with the ability to reach out warmly to new customers and staff and bring ERT services to them in a streamlined and efficient manner.

Cathie has an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and a background as an educator and writer.

Ron McHenry, NOAA Program Director

Ron McHenry has provided program management and systems engineering support to major NOAA programs and systems acquisitions since 1983. Ron comes to ERT from Nortel Government Solutions (NGS) where he served as the Director of NOAA Programs since June 2005 with operations/P&L responsibility for $4M/yr in satellite ground systems and network support contracts with NESDIS. Ron also served as the capture manager for all NGS NOAA new business including key wins like the Instrument Processing Engineering Support contract with NESDIS OSD and blade cluster support to the NWS MADIS program. Prior to NGS, Ron worked at Raytheon for over 12 years. He played a key role in winning the $300M Raytheon AWIPS O&M contract in 2005. Ron was the Raytheon SNITS Program Manager (2001-2005) and acting Deputy PM for the entire $50M QSS SNITS contract with NWS. Ron was the acting Deputy PM of the $25M Raytheon SETSS contract at NWS and the PM of the $10M Raytheon SEASS contract with the AWIPS Program Office (1999-2001), providing systems engineering, database management, web publishing, program management and other services. Ron also provided program management and systems engineering support to FAA weather systems (1988-1993) and systems engineering support to the NEXRAD JSPO (1983-1988).

Ron has a BA in Physics from Catholic University and an MS in Physics from Purdue University.