Roderick Snell, founder and research director at Snell & Wilcox, has been selected as the 2006 SMPTE Progress Medal Award recipient. The Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers recognized Snell for his more than 40 years in the broadcast industry.
The SMPTE Progress Medal Award honors an individual who has made outstanding technical contributions to the progress of engineering phases of the motion picture and/or TV industries, an invention or research and development that has resulted in a significant advance in these technologies and an individual who has made these contributions during a number of years.
Snell co-founded Snell & Wilcox in 1973 as a consultancy and began developing cost-effective TV standards-conversion for the emerging world broadcast marketing in the early 1980s. The company and its team has won multiple Emmy awards for advanced processing technologies and, with its newest product offerings, continues to earn industry praise at international exhibitions.
Snell is a visiting professor at the business school of the University of Kingston, Surrey; a fellow of the Royal Television Society; a governor of SMPTE; and a participant in a number of UK and European industry initiatives, including membership on the executive team of the IEE’s Multimedia Communications Group and the EU’s Information Society Technologies Advisory Group.
Snell will receive the SMPTE Progress Medal Award from SMPTE president Edward P. Hobson at the society’s awards ceremony during the annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in Hollywood, CA, from Oct. 18-21.
