Don Scheuch was one of the first recruits from the Radio Research Lab (RRL) at Harvard. When Tom Morrin joined SRI in 1948 as the Director of the first SRI Engineering effort, he encouraged several of the more talented and experienced staff at RRL to come west to the newly established SRI in California. They came to Stanford and to SRI to build a regional center of electronics capability (later to be known as Silicon Valley). Like several others at RRL, Don Scheuch saw this as an opportunity to take on a new responsibility at SRI and, at the same time, to continue his work toward a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford.
Scheuch joined SRI in May of 1949 and organized SRI's first Systems Analysis activity, attracting many young engineers to the area. Later, he was asked to serve as Vice President for the Electronics and Radio Sciences Division, which made up about 60% of the Engineering Research Group. The laboratories under his direction gained national recognition for providing pioneering work in support of the national air defense and ballistic missile defense efforts.
In the 1960s, Dr. Scheuch became the Engineering Group Director and later Senior Vice President for all of Engineering. The Group grew to more than 1000 staff. Under President Charlie Anderson's Office of Research Operations (ORO), Dr. Scheuch was appointed as chief of all of SRI's research activities. Don was a friendly and outgoing manager. He was particularly supportive and encouraging to the more junior people who were being recruited at that time of rapid growth.
Following his retirement from SRI in the early 1980s, he joined a local venture capital firm to offer his technical expertise to their investment skills. He still makes his home in nearby Portola Valley.