No engineering degree. Thanks.
What, you think only "engineers" can understand instrumentation and measurement?? Dude, I "teach" engineers about instrumentation and measurement. I design instrumentation for a living (and have done that the mentioned forty year period). Every patent and publication I've ever done has been about instrument design.
My company just heard today that one of the microfluidics systems I developed for biowarfare agent detection is performing flawlessly in field tests (pre-production multi-unit prototype phase). This is after many months of testing for the "single-unit" prototype.