R. Louis Bellaire

Dr. R. Louis (Lou) Bellaire is the acting chief technology ventures officer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The Technology Ventures Office was established in 2018 to support access to and development of commercial technologies relevant to national security.

In 2013, Bellaire worked for Service Management Group, a customer feedback management firm. He was the senior vice president of data science, the chief technical strategist, and hands-on innovation lead for enterprise consumer insight technology. These technologies convert multisource consumer data into comprehensive insights for more than 300 national healthcare, restaurant, and retail brands.  

At Lincoln Laboratory in 2009, Bellaire was promoted to leader of the Intelligence and Decision Technologies Group in the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Systems and Technology Division. He led a large, multidisciplinary team developing big data analytics software and systems for geospatial, image, signals, and open-source data applications. His responsibilities included the delivery of information integration, multisource fusion, and net-centric enterprise systems for ISR and tactical system applications.

In 2006, he was selected for an Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) assignment to the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) as the technical director of the Sensors Directorate. In this role, he was responsible for all operational missile defense sensors deployed globally, including in Israel, England, Greenland, Japan, and the United States. He was the technical lead for $600 million in annual government contracts and helped supervise more than 300 government and contractor engineers.

Bellaire joined Lincoln Laboratory in 1996 as a technical staff member in the Systems Testing and Analysis Group. He worked on target discrimination, data fusion, and radar and optical sensor systems. He was a key contributor to a real-time discrimination demonstration utilizing advanced techniques with a prototype X-band missile defense radar. This demonstration was notable for the first use of a real-time radar sidecar for adjunct processing of an X-band phased array radar data stream; this capability subsequently proliferated to many operational Department of Defense radar systems.

Bellaire was awarded a Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service in 2008, an MDA Rising Star Award in 2009, and an MDA Technology Achievement Award in 2010. He holds a BS degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, both in electrical engineering.  He is also an alumnus of Harvard Business School.