Robert A. Gonsalves

Emeritus Professor

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Tufts University
161 College Avenue
Medford, MA  02155

Home address:
12 Lexington Street
Woburn, MA  01801

email: bobg@eecs.tufts.edu
        Bob Gonsalves on holiday in Madrid, Spain, November 2005


Robert A. Gonsalves is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tufts University.  He received the BS in Electrical Engineering at Tufts University and the MS and Ph.D. from Northeastern University.

Professor Gonsalves spent 40 years in academia, 20 years at Northeastern, then 20 years at Tufts.  He was Chair of his department from 1996 to 2000 and from 2002 to 2004.  He became an Emeritus Professor in 2005.

At Tufts he taught courses in basic Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a picture processing course for freshmen, a Fourier Optics course, and a graduate course on digital image processing.  A student newspaper, The Primary Source, selected him as one of the twelve best teachers on the campus in 1997, 1999 and 2001: "Dedication and quality teaching earn Professor Gonsalves a strong recommendation from The Source."   In 2000 he won the Leibner Award for Excellence in Education and Advising. 

His area of expertise is digital image processing, with applications in the graphic arts, medicine, astronomy, and historical images.  He has consulted with about 17 companies, including long-term associations with Eikonix/Ektron/Kodak and Mission Research Corporation.  He is also the founder and former President of Lexitek, Inc., which builds instrumentation for innovative research in optics.

In 1990 he helped NASA correct the flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope's optics.  He used "phase retrieval" and "phase diversity" to calculate a prescription to correct the flaw.   In 1993 astronauts inserted the correcting optics and the imagery was greatly improved.

As part of Frontline's 1993 TV production on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he analyzed two home movies of the Sixth Floor of the Book Depository Building in Dallas.  He also analyzed imagery for the 1999 NOVA production on the Loch Ness Monster, Nessie.  He is currently helping NASA design the optics for the Next Generation Space Telescope and is working with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to image planets of nearby stars.

Professor Gonsalves is a former member and chairman of the Woburn School Committee, the Woburn Redevelopment Authority and the Committee to Revitalize Downtown Woburn.  He is a Life Trustee of the Woburn Public Library. He holds five patents, is a member of five scientific organizations, is a Fellow of the International Society of Optical Engineers, and is a Registered Professional Engineer in Massachusetts.

A part-time house builder, he designed and built a contemporary solar home and two neo-colonial homes.  He and his wife, Patricia, live in Woburn, MA in an 1840 colonial he rehabilitated in 2004.  They have five children and seven grandchildren.


Lecturing to Fourier Optics Lab Students

Demonstrating Image Processing Techniques

Robert Gonsalves, bobg@eecs.tufts.edu
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