While at MIT, Duntley met and worked with Karl Taylor Compton, Harold Eugene Edgerton, and many other prominent physicists.
It was focused on applying optics to such problems as camouflage, misdirection of aerial bombardment, target location, visibility of submerged objects at sea.
[2] The work of the laboratory centered on the transmission of visible light through the atmosphere and water and the related problems of image formation and recognition.
As a result of these requirements, many unique and very specialized instruments were developed by the laboratory, many of which were based on concepts or optical designs devised by Duntley.
He earned the academic rank of professor in 1966 and taught at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and at the Department of Applied Physics and Information Science (APIS) at the University of California, San Diego until his retirement.