Dr. Harris' professional career began in 1958, when he joined the Hughes Aircraft Company. His work with the company concerned research in antennas and wave propagation and included special studies for such programs as Surveyor, the first lunar soft-landing vehicle. His journal publications while with the company described optimized current distributions for antennas mounted on shaped structures such as aircraft and delineated plasma induced antenna pattern degradation effects for hypersonic reentry vehicles.

Following his undergraduate work at what is now the Polytechnic Institute of New York, Dr. Harris spent a year as a Hughes masters fellow and three years as a Hughes doctoral fellow earning his M. S. (1959) and Ph.D. (1965) degrees from Cal Tech and U.C.L.A., respectively. During the academic year 1965-66, he was a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Pierre Grivet's laboratory at the University of Paris. His work in Paris served to establish a correspondence between linear accelerators of circular and elliptic cross-section.

From 1966-1974, Dr. Harris was member of the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Washington. His research was concerned with integrated optics, optical communications, and biomedical engineering. He and his students made a number of pioneering contributions to integrated optics in such areas as optical signal processing; prism, periodic and horn couplers; electroptic modulation; two dimensional diffraction, refraction and lens design; and laser coupling to fibers. He and his students also made original bioengineering contributions in ultrasonic measurement of urethral flow properties during micturation and optical spectroscopic measurements in whole blood. Dr. Harris taught and developed courses in electromagnetics, electronics, optics, and instrumentation. He was made a Fellow of the I.E.E.E. in 1981 for his contributions to integrated optics.

From 1974-1980, Dr. Harris served as Director of the Devices and Waves Program and its successor programs in Quantum Electronics and Solid State and Microstructures Engineering at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. He had administrative responsibility for Engineering research activities in electronics, lasers, plasmas, magnetics, acoustics, and electromagnetics. While at the Foundation, he originated and developed concepts that resulted in establishment of the National Research and Resource Facility for Submicron Structures at Cornell University and the Foundation's broadly based microstructures program. These efforts pioneered federal support for nanostructures research at universities. The annual budgets for the programs administered by Dr. Harris quadrupled during his 6 years at NSF.

Dr. Harris served as Dean of the College of Engineering at San Diego State University for a 22 month period from 1980-82. The college included 2500 students and over 100 full and part-time faculty in Departments of Aerospace, Civil, Mechanical, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. His major achievement was to administer growth of federally funded research activities in the College which started from negligible amounts and rose to values that placed the College in a national leadership role among masters level institutions.

Dr. Harris presently serves as a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is teaching courses in very large scale integrated circuits, digital logic design, and electric circuits. He has also been a consultant to the Naval Ocean Systems Center where he developed concepts for demultiplexing wavelength multiplexed optical communication channels and producing high speed inter-chip data transfer using fiber-optic based switching. His recent research has been concerned with VLSI design of error correction decoders and sorting structures.