Welcome!

My name is Justin Poh. I have PhD in Systems Engineering and System Safety from the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I did my PhD research under the mentorship of Dr Nancy Leveson. My research lives at the intersection of System Safety and Systems Engineering and I develop methods for performing safety-driven design of complex systems. A key theme of my research is the application of Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) to systems engineering activities, with a particular focus on architecture development. I am also interested in developing STPA-based design review and certification processes. 

​Prior to pursuing my masters and PhD at MIT, I was formerly a systems engineer on the Vehicle Systems Engineering Team at Motional (formerly known as Aptiv's Mobility & Services Group and, prior to that, known as nuTonomy) where I worked for 4 years on system architecture, diagnostics, and debugging of autonomous vehicles. As part of these efforts, I worked closely with the Safety Engineering team at Motional to incorporate safety-related considerations into the system architecture for a vehicle during the development process. I also helped to develop requirements and a subsystem architectures for the radar and vision subsystems on the vehicle.

At MIT, my Masters and PhD research was focused on developing structured, safety-driven approaches to creating system architectures for complex systems in the aviation and space domains. Instead of decomposing stakeholder needs to create the system architecture, my research uses STPA results to drive the creation of a system architecture. This includes first designing the right system behavior to enforce the necessary safety constraints and then exploring the architectural tradespace to identify the best potential architectures (i.e. system structures) for implementing that desired system behavior. Both of my theses are available for download from my list of publications.
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In addition to my academic interests in aerospace systems, I also hold an FAA Private Pilot's License (PPL). I typically fly either a Piper Warrior/Archer (PA28) or a Piper Tomahawk (PA38) out of Hanscom Field (KBED).

​Thanks for stopping by!

Photo Credit: Adam Munekata