Zachary Chance

Dr. Zachary Chance is a senior staff member in the Integrated Missile Defense Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. 

Chance joined the Laboratory in 2011 as a student intern in the Integrated Missile Defense Technology Group. In 2012, he became a technical staff member in that group, focusing on radar systems, signal processing techniques, and tracking and classification algorithms for missile defense applications. Notably, he served as deputy chief engineer for the KREMS Technology Rearchitecting program to modernize the backend electronic components of the four world-class radars at the Laboratory's Kwajalein Field Site. He also drove a transformative vision for modern data engineering within the group's flight-test and experimentation pipeline, enabling broad access to historic and simulated data for inference and classification algorithm training.

His work has led to several successful technology transitions to government sponsors and industry partners, including the Missile Defense Agency and Raytheon. For his work on mitigating 5G interference for radar systems, he co-received a 2026 R&D 100 Award. Beyond his technical achievements, Chance is regarded for his mentorship and teaching. He regularly mentors new staff, interns, and military cadets and leads the Air, Missile, and Maritime Defense Technology Division's Introduction to Radar course, offered internally to staff and externally to the wider research community.

Chance is a senior member of IEEE and a reviewer for four IEEE Transactions journals: Aerospace and Electronic Systems, Communications, Signal Processing, and Wireless Communications. He is also a member of the IEEE Signal Processing, Information Theory, and Aerospace and Electronic Systems Societies and serves on the technical program committee for several IEEE conferences. Chance earned his PhD and BS in electrical engineering from Purdue University.