Herbert J. Carlin, the J. Preston Levis Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Cornell, died Feb. 9 in Walnut Creek, Calif. He was 91 years old.

Carlin, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1966, was a leading authority in the fields of wideband circuit design and network theory and helped advance the development of modern telecommunications technology. He served as the director of the School of Electrical Engineering (now the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering) from 1966 to 1975.

He spent a year as a senior research fellow at the Physics Laboratory of the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and was a visiting professor at several institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tianjin University in China and University College Dublin.

Carlin also served as chairman of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Professional Group on Circuit Theory and received the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984.

Born in New York City and raised in the Bronx, Carlin received his B.S. degree at Columbia University, M.S. at the Columbia University School of Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn where he later became chairman of the Department of Electrophysics.

Carlin was a passionate and informed music lover who played the piano and flute and was a fiercely opinionated observer of baseball and politics.

He is survived by his wife of 35 years and several children and grandchildren.