A celebration of 50 years of Don Johnson's leadership in
digital signal processing research and education
On 28 April 2025, we celebrated Professor Don Johnson and his remarkable 50 years of excellence at Rice University. His unwavering dedication to education, his innovative research, and his transformative contributions to the ECE community have made a lasting impact.
DoJo50 commemorated and celebrated the past, present, and future of one of the longest-running successful research and education programs at Rice with a variety of speakers, panel sessions, and discussions.
WHEN: Monday, April 28, 2025
WHERE: Duncan Hall, Rice University, Houston, Texas
EMAIL photos to dojo50fotos@rice.edu
Don Johnson biography
Don Johnson was born on July 9, 1946 in the small town of Mt. Pleasant, Texas to Ashley and Maureen (Covin) Johnson. Don’s dad, a chemical engineer, was superintendent at a small independent oil refinery in Mt. Pleasant. For several years while Don and his brother were growing up, they actually lived on the grounds of that oil refinery, delighting in the occasional fires that occasionally flared at the refinery.
When Don was 14, the family moved to Memphis, where he attended high school. When the time came, Don applied to Rice, but because he was no longer a Texas resident, he did not make the quota they had then for out of state students and was not accepted. Luckily, he had also applied earlier to MIT and was soon off to Cambridge in 1964.
On visits back to Memphis, Don got together with a former high school classmate, Carol and they were married the summer after his junior year at MIT. By his senior year there was a third member of the family, their daughter Alexa. Remember, this was the time of the Vietnam War and young men all over the country lived with the knowledge they might be called to serve in the armed forces. Luckily, Don was covered by college and then teaching deferments and was not drafted (though briefly classified A1, then given a deferral by the Cambridge, MA draft board.)
Because he had a young family to support, Don started working during the summers at Lincoln Labs, a major research lab outside Boston while working on his doctoral thesis in auditory physiology. During his second summer, Al Oppenheim was his office mate and Don ended up learning DSP and doing computer programming for Al, who was developing the first Digital Signal Processing class taught at MIT. A later summer at Lincoln Labs, Tom Parks was his officemate and Don learned of the work Tom and Sid Burrus were doing at Rice.
After completing all of his academic degrees at MIT, Don went to work full time at Lincoln Labs for three years, then looking for a more academic environment and a change (especially in climate,) applied for a position at Rice, arriving there in 1977.
During his job interview, an EE faculty member was impressed with Don’s UNIX experience; one of the first things he was asked to do at Rice was install the first UNIX system on campus on a PDP minicomputer. Because Electrical Engineering at the time was the only department with their own computers, they lead the way in adopting UNIX on campus.
In 1984, with the arrival of the first Macintosh on campus, Don became the faculty representative from Rice to the new Apple University Consortium, a select group of both Ivy League and smaller elite colleges with whom Apple shared technical information as well as giving deep discounts on computer purchases. During an AUC technical conference in Cupertino, Don met his now wife, Katy McKinin, then at Notre Dame University. In 1985, Katy accepted a job at Rice in the IT department (ICSA.). In 1986, the two were married and will celebrate their 39th anniversary next month.
In 1992, Don’s former graduate student Larry Ciscon together with JD Wise invited Don to join in starting Modulus Technologies, Inc. (the first technology startup in the department.) The company was small, but successful and received several NASA grants for its asynchronous communications software algorithms as well as US patents. In 1998, the company was purchased by Enron with an eye to utilizing the technology in its ill-fated Broadband initiative. Sadly, Enron later collapsed due to mismanagement and accounting fraud, but the technology actually did work!
In 1997, the annual international conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society was held in Munich, Germany. Due to an unfortunate lack of awareness on the part of the organizers, the dates of the conference that year matched exactly the dates of Passover (April 21 – 24) offending many scientists from Israel and elsewhere. As then president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Don decided to make a gesture of apology by making a trip to Israel immediately after the conference, giving talks in Tel Aviv and Haifa.
In 1999, a new private university was founded in Bremen, Germany and for its first few years had a close collaboration with Rice, including advice and guidance on how to build a university, assignment of administration staff from Rice to the campus and the encouragement of faculty and student exchanges. The language of instruction was English and the student body was international with many students coming from central and eastern Europe and Russia.
In 2005 Don took advantage of the connection and used a sabbatical to teach at IUB from January to June of that year. The campus was on the grounds of a former Luftwaffe military base taken over by the US at the end of WWII. Don’s apartment on campus was in the former officers’ quarters.
During his time in Germany, Don was also actively researching a biography he was writing: “The Oslo Person, the biography of Frans Ferdinand Mayer. (The final book, over 700 pages, was never published, but may be available online somewhere on Don’s ECE server account.).
One of the hallmarks of Don’s teaching style is his ability to pull in interesting history of science background into his classes, like who was the Norton that the Norton Equivalent Circuit was named for? While researching Norton, Don discovered that the same idea in Europe was known as the Mayer-Norton equivalent circuit and began investigating who Mayer was. The full story is fascinating, but it turns out that Mayer was a telecom engineer who was director of Siemen’s electronics research lab during WWII, well-placed to know a great deal about the technology behind Germany’s weapons research. Unbeknownst to anyone, not even family, Mayer secretly typed a long letter detailing everything he knew while visiting Oslo, Norway and sent it anonymously to the British Embassy in Oslo. The information did eventually make its way to MI6 and was very significant to the Allied war effort. With the help of a native German librarian at Rice, Don had been able to make contact with one of Mayer’s son in Germany, later visiting him and gaining a lot useful background including access to original documents.
Around 2008 a fellow DSP colleague, Dr. Rick Johnson of Cornell University, gave a lecture at Rice that described programs he was developing for automating “thread counting” of painting canvases. Don felt he could write a better algorithm that could analyze the entire canvas and as well as describe a number of other characteristics of it. Don collaborated with Rick Johnson over the next few years, counting canvases for several major museums and developing his algorithm into a full-fledged Matlab-based application. The application now has a full graphical user interface (for non-technical art conservators.) Don has continued working with many museums around the world, and has a long-standing Adjunct Research Fellow position with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Since the late 80s, Don has been an avid cyclist, still biking 50 – 100 miles a week. In the 90’s, we both participated in just about every organized bike ride in the state, including at least 8 times riding the MS-150 (Houston to Austin) and a week-long cycling trip in the Rockies. Now Don rides around our “farm” near Chappell Hill, Texas with longer organized rides with Houston Bicycle Club buddies.
– Katy McKinin, 2025
