Born in White Plains, NY in 1935, he majored in EE at MIT, graduating in 1956. At the University of Connecticut, he earned a MS in Electrical & Systems Engineering in 1958, and went on to get a PhD in physiology at UCONN in 1964. He joined the UCONN EE faculty in 1964, and in 1965, secured a 5-year graduate training grant from NIGMS/NIH to start one of the first Biological Engineering graduate training programs in New England. Throughout his career Dr. Northrop's research interests have been broad and interdisciplinary: He has worked on insect vision, electrofishing, exogenous closed-loop drug injection systems, mathematical models for the human immune system, biomedical instrumentation including non-invasive blood glucose sensing, and complex systems. He retired from the UCONN ECE faculty in 1997, and has continued to teach grad courses and write textbooks; he has written eight to-date. His current research interest lies in Complexity and Complex Systems. He lives in Chaplin, CT with his wife and a smooth fox terrier.
