Human Engineering

GPS and the U.S. Air Force provided this engineer with a path to his wide-ranging career in integrated navigation systems.

If we were to think of the GNSS enterprise as a ship sailing the high seas of space, then space weather expert Genene Fisher would be up in the crow’s nest, on the lookout for asteroids instead of icebergs.

In which a boy from Detroit gives up backyard Corvair re-assembly to study mechanical engineering and spends the next 26 years getting ever deeper into the GPS program.

This Spanish engineer’s work combines signal design with international diplomacy to make sure the GNSSes all get along.

Imagine that your only light source is a 50-watt bulb. Visualize it shining at you from 12,000 miles away. That’s about how weak the signals are from the new Galileo and Compass satellites, and that’s why Grace Xingxin Gao’s accomplishments in being the first to derive the code generators for both systems are so amazing.

The aerospace engineering professor has contributed to RAIM, GPS bistatic radar, satellite formation flying using GPS, GPS-based orbit and satellite attitude determination, and multipath mitigation —and to the future of middle school girls, who she encourages to stay tough about pursuing a rigorous scientific education.

The Naval Research Lab's GPS clock master Ron Beard dwells in the realm of the nanosecond. That's one billionth of a second, a virtually incomprehensible unit of time even for geeks. But the seamless operation of our cell phones, power grid, banking, and other GNSS-driven technologies depends on that degree of precision.

This geomatics engineer pioneered the use of GPS in Latin America—now he wants to integrate all of Brazil's geoscience data into layers of information available to everyone over the Internet.

His disinclination to punch a time clock led to a career creating high-precision GNSS software and hardware. For NavCom Technology's engineering master, it's all relative - or maybe not....

An inventor and technology transfer expert, her trademark is taking an inexpensive device and finding a new use for it that raises the bar for accuracy in navigation

Who helped design all of the Navstar GPS navigation signals, keeps the GPS Interface Control Documents, and patented the innovation that allows an unmanned aircraft to land itself? Karl Kovach, the “GPS guy.”

If IGS Director Ruth Neilan had just one magic GNSS wish, it would be that everyone understood the importance of tying into the international grid.

A career in the great Canadian outdoors ended early for Pat Fenton when his pioneering work on computer-aided processing of field survey data landed him permanently in the office. Now he’s chief technology officer at NovAtel with a long list of engineering achievements in GNSS signal processing and receiver design.

GNSS has lead Allison Kealy from a small island, her birthplace in Trinidad, to the world’s largest: Australia. In the former, she was a nascent surveyor; in the latter, the first female academic appointee in the University of Melbourne’s Geomatics department.

Electronic engineer Philip Mattos loves the English countryside and mows his field with technology no more sophisticated than a 1948 tractor – meanwhile, the skies above his head are full of GNSS technology for which he has been designing products over the past 30 years.

Someday, coordinates will be part of every product and process in our lives, says GPS innovator Karen Van Dyke of the Volpe Transportation Systems Center. As one of the engineers working towards that goal, she uses GNSS to make the air transportation infrastructure more reliable, less vulnerable, and easier to monitor.

Michael S. Braasch got his GNSS start trying to crack Selective Availability. But that’s not all — he is the cofounder and technical director of GPSoft LLC, which produces a series of navigation “toolboxes” for MATLAB, the engineering software environment used worldwide.