Herbert Warren Cooper III (S-‘48 SM –’55, F-’70, LF – ‘86) was born 19 July 1920 in Chicago, Illinois to Alberta Davis Cooper and Herbert Warren Cooper, Jr. He attended public schools in Chicago and then high school at Roosevelt Military Academy in Aledo, IL.

He entered the University of Wisconsin, majoring in Chemical Engineering, then during World War II volunteered for the U. S. Army Enlisted Reserve Corps and was assigned to electronics courses at the American Television Laboratories and Northwestern University. During his advanced course at Northwestern he was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and after training in Morse code and cryptography was assigned to OSS HQ, South East Asia Command (SEAC) in Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). As head of OSS Radio Communications in Kandy during 1944-1945, Cooper was responsible for building the station from a single low-powered transmitter to a large base station with five high powered transmitters, extensive antenna systems, and a remote six position receiving station, as well as for training the radio operators and transmitter technicians. For this he received a letter of commendation from the OSS Communications Officer for the India-Burma Theatre.

This electronics experience changed Cooper from Chemical to Electrical Engineering and under the GI Bill received his BS in EE in 1947 from New Mexico State University and his MS in EE in 1948 from Stanford University with the help of a Research Assistantship in their Microwave Laboratory. On suggestion by Professor Frederick Terman he accepted a position at Airborne Instruments Laboratory (AIL) to which many of the electronic countermeasures engineers and managers who had been at the Harvard Radio Research Laboratory (RRL), directed during WWII by Terman, had moved. He was involved in the design of octave bandwidth microwave countermeasures antennas and in AIL met Marie Jameson, another microwave antenna engineer, who had been at RRL during the war. They were married in 1950 and have two sons, Robert Warren Cooper, born in 1955 and Herbert Warren Cooper IV, born in 1959. Their daughter, Clarissa Marie, born in 1957, was killed by a motorcycle in 1976.

In 1954 he moved to Maryland Electronic Manufacturing Corporation (MEMCO) (subsequently Litton-AMECOM) as Director of Research and Development. MEMCO provided Instrument Landing Systems to the FAA and foreign customers.

In 1958 Cooper joined Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Defense and Electronic Systems Center (DEC) where he remained until he retired in1986. His engineering managerial positions in DEC research and development contributed to Westinghouse research, development, and production of aircraft landing, radar, electronic warfare, and space systems. He published or presented more than 20 papers and was awarded 15 U. S. Patents for microwave integrated circuits, surface acoustic waves, antennas, and aircraft navigational systems. His Fellow citation reads "For contributions to antenna development, microwave integrated circuit development, and the application of microwave techniques to aircraft instrument landing systems."