Mr. Sykes graduated cum laude from the Univ. of California/Berkeley in 1968 and received a Masters Degree from Cornell Univ. He began his career at Walter Gropius' firm, TAC in Cambridge MA where he worked on Children's Hospital and projects in the Middle East. Becoming Vice President at Design Research, he returned to his earlier interest in cognitive science, specifically the impact of environmental factors on decision-making and performance.
In 2001 he joined a Bolt Beranek and Newman spin-out (the noted R&D firm that pioneered scientific acoustics). He is Executive Chair of the Acoustics Research Council and the FGI Acoustics Working Group a Senior Research Fellow at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and lead author of Springer-Verlag's 'Sound & Vibration.'