Wednesday, September 08, 2021

Barry Burke Passed Away

Barry E. Burke passed away on September 7, 2021, after a long illness.

Barry was a MIT Lincoln Laboratory Fellow. For most of his nearly 49-year career, he has worked on CCDs. Among the CCDs designed by Burke are those used in the space-borne soft-X-ray astronomy missions ASCA (Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics), Chandra, and Suzaku. Visible-band CCDs he developed are being used in several observatories, including the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii. He is the co-inventor of the orthogonal-transfer CCD (OTCCD), a device which can compensate for image motion by pixel shifting and which is used in the Pan-STARRS imagers. He recently completed design work on the CCD imagers used on the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched in April 2018.

Dr. Burke has authored or coauthored more than 100 publications and conference proceedings and is the inventor or co-inventor on 18 patents. His last papers have been published as recently as in August 2021. He was a Fellow of the IEEE.

3 comments:

  1. I had a great deal of respect and admiration for Barry. His publications, presentations and discussions were always honest, clear, and informative along with pushing CCD technology forward. He was a very nice and generous guy.

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  2. We lost a gem today, he was pioneer for CCD industry developments

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  3. Albert Theuwissen - President IISSSeptember 8, 2021 at 10:22 PM

    What a great loss. Such a great personality, always friendly, always humble. A great CCD engineer has left us. I am sure I can speak in name of the International Image Sensor Society. RIP Barry.

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