Kenneth R. Laker, a professor emeritus in the department of electrical and systems engineering in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, died on August 2. He was 76. 

Dr. Laker received a BS in electrical engineering from Manhattan College in 1969. He earned an MS in 1970 and a PhD in electrical engineering from New York University in 1973. After graduating, he served in the U.S. Air Force as First Lieutenant, working with the Air Force Cambridge Research Labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Laker worked at Bell Labs before joining Penn’s faculty in 1984 as a professor and department chair of electrical engineering. In 1990, Dr. Laker became the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Electrical Engineering. He retired from Penn in 2016 and took emeritus status. 

At Penn, Dr. Laker conducted research in mixed mode integrated circuit design and testing. He focused on high performance, low-power data acquisition and radio-frequency systems, which have many important applications and present challenging obstacles for design, implementation, and testing. Dr. Laker was also very active with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, where he served as president (Almanac April 7, 1998) and championed the use of the internet to bring members together and distribute publications. Dr. Laker was elected to the IEEE’s Technical Activities Board Hall of Honor in 2018 (Almanac November 6, 2018). Dr. Laker also served on the boards of AANetcom and DFT Microsystems, the latter of which he co-founded in 1997. Dr. Laker wrote four textbooks, authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles, and filed six patents.

He received numerous honors and awards, among those the 1994 AT&T Clinton Davisson Trophy for his patent in switched capacitor circuits, and the 1998 IEEE Circuits and Systems Darlington Award for the paper “Integrated Circuit Testing for Quality Assurance in Manufacturing: History, Current Status, and Future Trends.”

Dr. Laker is survived by his wife, Mary Ellen (Lewis) Laker; his children, John (Alice), Chris (Jacqueline), Brian (Karen); and his grandchildren, Melanie, Jack, Georgia, and Lucia. A funeral mass was held on August 11 at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York.