Welcome!

My name is Justin Poh. I am currently a PhD student at the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department (Course 16) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the mentorship of Dr Nancy Leveson. My current research interests lie at the intersection of System Safety and Systems Engineering and I do research on principles and methods for performing safety-driven design of complex systems, including applications of Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) to systems engineering activities.

​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.

Here at MIT, the goal of my research is to develop 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. 

In addition to my academic interests in aerospace systems, I am also a recently certificated Private Pilot. I typically fly either a Piper Warrior/Archer (PA28) or a Piper Tomahawk (PA38) out of Hanscom Field (KBED).

Photo Credit: Adam Munekata