Keith McDonald, Ph.D.

McDonald, who joined MITRE in 2000, has been a technical contributor and leader of efforts in theoretical analysis, modeling and simulation, prototyping, laboratory and field testing, acquisition, and overall systems engineering for sponsors across the military services, intelligence communities, and the Department of Homeland Security. A recent area of focus includes serving as a trusted technical advisor to the Air Force PNT Strategy Working Group under the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability. As a technical fellow, McDonald builds upon his history of setting strategic direction and coordinating the technical execution of MITRE’s PNT work portfolio across its federally funded research and development centers to meet opportunities and challenges of national importance.  

Over the past several years McDonald has served as MITRE’s PNT director as well as the chief engineer for the Electronic Systems Innovation Center within MITRE Labs. McDonald was also the U.S. deputy to the International Navwar Memorandum of Understanding Electronic Attack Working Group—a consortium focused on collaborative technology growth. He has written and presented conference papers, journal papers, and book chapters with a focus on space-time adaptive processing for jammer mitigation and GPS receiver anti-spoofing algorithms. He was also named a top 50 “Leader to Watch” by GPS World Magazine.

McDonald is a long-standing member of the Institute of Navigation (ION), frequently serving as session chair and presenter at its conferences. He is also an officer in the ION’s Military Division. In 2016 McDonald re-invigorated the New England section of the ION, which had been inactive for several years, and was elected as section chair.

McDonald received his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Lehigh University, where he researched space-time adaptive processing techniques for electronic protection of radar systems as well as mathematical modeling of communication system interference.