Keith Brendley
Keith W. Brendley (born 1958) is a leading American authority on active protection systems, and serves as president of Artis, a company which provides high-technology systems to defense and commercial markets. Early life Brendley was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, the second of four sons of Donald and Dolores Brendley. His father served in the U.S. Air Force and worked as a financial executive for McDonnell Douglas and other firms, and later taught accounting at Richland Community College in Decatur, Illinois. In 1976, Brendley graduated from Clinton High School in Clinton, Illinois. He attended the University of Illinois, where he received a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering. He went on to receive his M.S. degree from the University of Maryland in mechanical engineering. He also attended a graduate program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Business background Brendley founded Artis, a firm which uses high-speed sensing and massive parallel processing to build safety and defense systems, in 1999. One of the company’s signature products is an active protection system called Iron Curtain, which defeats rocket-propelled grenades and other shoulder-launched threats using counter-munitions. Previously, he worked at Noesis, Inc., a research and development firm later acquired by QinetiQ North America,