John Doty, PhD
President, Noqsi Aerospace, ltd, and Cheif Engineer for HETE-2

B.S., Physics, MIT 1973
Ph.D., Physics, MIT 1978
MIT Staff Member 1980
MIT Research Scientist 1981
President of Noqsi Aerospace Ltd. 2004
MIT Research Associate 2007


John Doty began his career in high energy astronomy as a member of the MIT X-ray Balloon Group. He received his Ph.D. for research carried out with the SAS-3 satellite on the binary X-ray source GX 1+4. He was pivotally involved in the research at MIT in which many of the properties of X-ray bursts were first established. He has contributed to many astronomical instrumentation developments. He helped devise the All Sky Monitor for the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (launched 1995), and also helped design the architecture of its data system. He designed the electronics for the SNAPSHOT CCD camera on NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory: in 1988, this instrument achieved the first detection of Pluto's atmosphere. He was Project Engineer for the CCD Silicon Imaging Spectrometer (SIS) on the ASCA satellite (launched 1993). He is a co-investigator for the ACIS CCD focal plane array for the Chandra mission (launched 1999), and designed the measurement chains for that instrument. He was Project Scientist for the HETE-1 satellite (destroyed by a launch vehicle failure in 1996), and was Project Scientist for HETE-2 (launched 2000). He was a co-investigator, thermal designer, and electrical designer for the CCD focal planes on the ASTRO-E1 mission (launch vehicle failure, 2000), and is a co-investigator on its replacement, the Suzaku mission (launched 2005). He is a co-inventor of the event-driven CCD architecture (patent granted 2005) and inventor of a very small, efficient and accurate digitizer for video (patent pending). He has recently, in collaboration with Osaka University, successfully designed a custom integrated circuit implementing this video digitizer.

Funding provided in part by Department of Labor, Employment & Training Administration: WIRED Initiative