Donald H Kelly attended the University of Rochester and studied under Brian O’Brien. During the war, Kelly applied to the Navy at O’Brien’s recommendation. He worked at Mitchell Camera Corp. for a short time before being assigned to the Aircraft Camouflage Section of the Tactical Test Unit of the Bureau of Aeronautics. There, he rose through the ranks, eventually serving as the only member of that department.

After the war, Kelly joined the research department at Technicolor Corp and stayed there for 15 years. While there, he was pursuing a graduate degree at UCLA. In 1961, when Kelly left Technicolor, he joined Itek in Massachusetts. He soon received a special assignment to work at the California location, which he took in 1963. By 1965, he was working solely in vision research and was invited to join SRI International, where he spent the rest of his career.

He was a Fellow of OSA and received the 1986 Edgar D. Tillyer Award “for his outstanding analysis of spatial, temporal, and chromatic responses of the human visual system.”

He passed away in 1997.