Malcolm Stitch

Biography

Malcolm L. Stitch (IRE Senior Member, 1958) was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on 23 April 1923. He received the B.A. degree in French and the B.S. degree in physics from the Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, both in 1947, and the Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University In New York City, in 1953.

From 1949 to 1951, Stitch was an Instructor in Physics at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, and the following year at Cooper Union College of Engineering in New York City. He worked as Research Physicist at Varian Associates in Palo Alto, California from 1953 to 1956. In 1956, he joined the Hughes Aircraft Company in Culver City, California, and in 1962, he was Manager of Laser Development in the Radar and Missile Electronics Laboratory at the company.

Stitch designed the first high-temperature microwave spectrometer and with colleagues examined the microwave spectra of the alkali halides in the neighborhood of 1000 degrees centigrade. He also led efforts to exploit the systems application of lasers by being responsible for the design of the COLIDAR (COherent LIght Detecting And Ranging) ranging system at Hughes. In addition, he made contributions to the fields of frequency control of microwaved tubes, maser theory and technology, atomic clocks, and quantum electronics.

Stitch was a Senior Member of IRE and a member of the Physical Society, the AAAS, the American Association of Physics Teachers, the Physical Society of Japan, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Sigma Xi.