American electrical engineer. Ph.D. electrical engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1963). Professional experience includes: research staff, MIT Lincoln Laboratory (circa 1963-1965); staff, electronics division head, assistant director, National Radio Astronomy Observatory (1965-1989); Martin Marietta (1989-1996); University of Massachusetts (1996-1999); California Institute of Technology; Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1999-). While still a graduate student at MIT, he developed the world's first digital autocorrelation spectrometer which he then used to place a new upper limit to Galactic deuterium, and in 1963 with Alan Barrett, Littleton Meeks, and J. C. Henry, he detected the OH ion, which was the first radio observation of an interstellar molecule. His autocorrelation spectrometer technique has been used at virtually every major radio observatory throughout the world and has been crucial in the subsequent explosive growth of interstellar molecular spectroscopy.