Robert David Middlebrook (May 16, 1929 – April 16, 2010) was a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Many of his former students are leaders in the field of power electronics today, including Slobodan Ćuk, Vatche Vorperian, Dragan Maksimovic, Robert Erickson, and V. Ramanarayanan.
[8] His goal with D-OA was to fundamentally change the way electrical engineering is taught in order to focus on practical design rather than circuit analysis.
Middlebrook advocated keeping circuit analysis and equations as simple as possible, only adding additional complexity when experiments show it to be necessary.
[7][9] A catchphrase familiar to Middlebrook's Caltech students is his dogged assertion of "salient points" in the application of his D-OA methodology during instruction or in redline on graded (homework) assignments or tests.