Robert E. McIntosh

Bob McIntosh received the B.S. degree (1962) from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the M.S. degree from Harvard University (1964), and the Ph.D. from the University of Iowa (1967).

Bob was a Fellow of the IEEE and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. He received a number of University awards, including the Senior Faculty Scholarship Alumni Award (1984), the General Electric Teaching Award (1988), and the University Research Fellowship (1995). He also received the Hobart Newell Award from Worcester Polytechnic Institute as a distinguished graduate from that institution’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Professional awards included the IEEE and Propagation Society (AP-S). He served as Editor of the Transactions on Antennas and Propagation and as a Guest Editor for the Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing and Proceedings of the IEEE. He was General Chairman of the 1976 AP-S Symposium and the 1985 GRS-S Symposium (IGARSS’85), both of which were held in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was also well known within the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S), and the International Union of Radio Science (URSI). Bob spent his entire career of 31 years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, rising to the rank of Distinguished University Professor in 1996. As a research-oriented Professor, he directed 20 Ph.D. dissertations, and co-authored over 80 journal papers. He spent one year as acting head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 17 years as Co-Director of the Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory, and was known throughout the microwave community for his leadership to establish the Microwave and Electronics Group within the ECE Department. Education of industrial students was a feature of this program, whose success can be measured by the awarding of over 180 M.S. degrees to employees from Raytheon, Lockheed-Sanders, and General Electric. Bob was also co-founder of Quadrant Engineering Inc., which is located in Amherst and specializes in building microwave and millimeter wave systems for remote sensing applications.

Our colleague and friend, Robert E. McIntosh, Jr., passed away on July 10, 1998 at the age of 58. Bob contracted a rare form of cancer, known as Zollinger-Ellison disease, in 1994. Throughout this ordeal, Bob kept a positive attitude, and a desire to confront the problem as directly as possible. (Date: Sep. 1998)