[3] That same year (1965) he joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department and the radio astronomy group of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.
[3] While on leave at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 1968, Staelin developed the computationally efficient fast folding algorithm[4] for detection of periodic signals, which enabled him and Edward C. Reifenstein III to find two pulsars in the vicinity of the Crab Nebula, which were close enough to it (given the angular resolution of the antenna) to potentially be associated with it.
[6] The first astronomical pulsar had been discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish in 1967,[7] but the origin of such pulsating radio signals had not yet been established.
[14] In 1968 Staelin and Norman E. Gaut founded Environmental Research and Technology, Inc. (acquired by AECOM in 1979), a company which specialized in air-quality measurements and became "one of the largest air quality monitoring sources in the world".
An outgrowth of his research in this area was the founding in 1984 of PicTel Corporation (renamed PictureTel Corp. in 1987; acquired by Polycom in 2001), by Staelin and his former students Brian Hinman and Jeffrey G.