Distinguished Engineer
Hometown: Lemmon
Electrical Engineering,
Following his graduation from South Dakota State College, John D. Dyson obtained an M.S. from the University of Illinois in 1950 and a Ph.D. in 1957. His work history includes: statistician, South Dakota State Highway Planning Survey, Pierre in 1940; U.S. Army, rank of Lt. Colonel, in 1941; and engineer-research staff, Sandia Corp., Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1951. Dyson joined the University of Illinois as a research assistant in 1952 and became professor of electrical engineering and associate director of the Radio Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois in 1966. Dyson developed, with V.H. Rumsey, the first of the Frequency Independent and Logarithmic Periodic Antennas in 1954. His later work was directed toward investigation of the operations and factors affecting the design of the logarithmic spiral antennas, direction finding systems, active matching networks and new techniques for measuring antennas and electromagnetic fields. He was a fellow of the Institute of Electrical Engineers and was listed in Who’s Who in Engineering, American Men and Women of Science and Leaders in Electronics. His wife Margaret Costlow Dyson was a 1940 SDSC graduate in rural sociology.