R. D. Doolittle has served the field of acoustics for 33 years as an investigator, author, supervisor, and administrator in the area of underwater sound, in particular. A fellow of the American Acoustical Society. he has served on committees related to the work of the Acoustical Society of America and the IEEE.A Ph.D. (physics) graduate of Catholic University (1968), he conducted research in towed and fixed acoustic arrays in open ocean and in shallow water including self-noise effects, signal processing, and acoustic propagation. For his reporting on the latter he received the Berman Publication award at the Naval Research Laboratory (1986). Most recently at the Office of Naval Research, he heads a multidisciplinary team in the study of reception of low-frequency signals and noise by multielement arrays utilizing matched field methods to determine signal detection and estimation.