NavtechGPS' Instructor Biographies

Keith D. McDonald	is Chairman and Technical Director of NavtechGPS. He was Scientific Director of the Dept. of Defense Navigation Satellite Program during the initial development of GPS and has remained continuously involved. He has taught GPS courses in the US and internationally for over 25 years, was a member of the National Academy of Science/National Research Council Committee on the Future of GPS and is a Fellow of both the UK Royal ION and the US ION.
Dennis Akos, Ph.D.	Dennis M. Akos, Ph.D., completed the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at Ohio University in the Avionics Engineering Center. His research interests include: GNSS, Software Defined Radio (SDR), applied/digital signal processing, and Radio Frequency (RF) design. Currently, he is with the Aerospace Engineering Science Department at University of Colorado at Boulder, and is a visiting professor at Luleå University as well as a consulting professor with Stanford University.
Penina Axelrad, Ph.D.	is Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado, where she teaches courses on GPS technology and conducts research on GPS-based orbit and attitude determination for satellites. She has been involved in GPS since 1985, and was previously a systems engineer in the GPS Systems Organization at Stanford Telecom, where she developed a variety of GPS receivers. She is the recipient of the 1996 AIAA Sperry Award. Dr. Axelrad is the current Chair of the ION Satellite Division, having served previously as the General Chair of ION GPS-97 and Technical Program Chair for the ION GPS-96, and several ION council positions.
Staffan Backén, M.Sc.	is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree at Luleå University of Technology in Luleå, Sweden in the field of GNSS antenna arrays. His research interests include array processing, RF design, weak signal processing and software defined radio. He will be co-teaching with his Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Dennis Akos.
John Betz, Ph.D.	is a Fellow of the MITRE Corp., and a Fellow of the US ION. He has contributed to modernized GPS signal designs, GPS receiver processing and has contributed to the interoperability between GPS and GALILEO, GLONASS, and QZSS. He is a member of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board and received the US State Dept Superior Merit Award for his work in US-EU negotiations on GPS and Galileo. He is NavtechGPS' Technical Advisor for Receiver Design.
Kai Borre, Ph.D.	has been a professor with the Department of Communication Technology at Aalborg University in Denmark since 1976. He received his doctoral degree from Graz University of Technology in Austria in 1986. He has authored or coauthored seven books. In 1998, he founded the Danish GPS Center. Dr. Kai Borre has coded several hundred Matlab® files for GPS related problems and the files are available to the public.
Franck Boynton	is Vice President of Technical Sales for NavtechGPS, specializing in off-the-shelf system integrations. Experienced in sales to military and civilian organizations, Mr. Boynton is certified by several manufacturers on their high accuracy GPS receiver systems and OEM products. He has been working with GPS since 1988. He is NavtechGPS' Technical Advisor for GPS Equipment and Applications.
Michael S. Braasch, Ph.D.	is an Associate Professor of E.E., and Research Scientist with the Avionics Engineering Center, at Ohio University. His research includes GPS receiver design, GPS/INS integration, and multipath mitigation. He served as technical advisor to the FAA and ICAO in precision approach and landing systems, and is recognized internationally for his work on characterizing the effects of multipath on GPS and GNSS accuracy. He is co-originator of the GPS Multipath Limiting Antenna (MLA) for LAAS. As a founder of GPSoft, a GPS software design company, Dr. Braasch has been instrumental in the development of both the SatNav Toolbox and the INS Toolbox for MATLAB™.
Adrian Browne, M.A., M.BA.	was educated at Cambridge University and the University of Toronto. He has consulted to IBM and Apple Computer and is currently a registered developer with Microsoft and RIM. Adrian is an expert in linking GPS devices to all types of computing devices (desktop, tablets and pocket computers) and merging this information with data taken from other devices such as RFID readers. He has extensive experience in real time datum/grid conversions, in evaluating differential and WAAS data, and in transferring data to Geographic Information Systems such as “ArcView”. In his latest work he has been specializing in using speech engines in pocket computers. In 1974, Adrian Browne started his current computer consulting business that focuses on designing and creating user friendly business applications. He started developing GPS software applications in 1993. In 1995, he was one of the founders and Chief Technical Officer of FieldWorker Products, a company that specializes in spatially related field data collection and its integration and use in the GIS field.
Thomas Burger, Ph.D.	is Navigation Signal Engineer for the European Space Agency Galileo Project Office. His main task is the definition and implementation of the Galileo navigation signal-in-space. Mr. Burger joined the ESA Galileo system team in 2005. He worked from 2003 to 2005 on the search-and- rescue SAR-Lupe project and for 6 years at Astrium GmbH, Friedrichshafen, Germany, as a navigation systems technology and signal processing expert. Mr. Burger holds a Diplom-Ingenieur degree in communications engineering from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and a Dr.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Darmstadt, Germany.
Kees de Jong, Ph.D.	has been involved in precise positioning with GPS since 1985. He is currently with the engineering firm Fugro in The Netherlands, where he is responsible for the development of integrated positioning systems. From 1998 until 2002 he was an assistant professor at the Department of Mathematical Geodesy and Positioning at Delft University of Technology, where he did research on real-time GNSS positioning, ambiguity resolution and quality control. From 1995 to 1997 he was a senior software engineer at Philips Electronics, where he was responsible for the integration of GPS and dead-reckoning sensors in a commercial car navigation system, which came on the market in 1996. Prior to joining Philips, he developed GPS and speech coding software for a number of companies in The Netherlands and Japan.
Bernd Eissfeller, Ph.D.	is Full Professor of Navigation and Director of the Institute of Geodesy and Navigation at the Univ. of Federal Armed Forces, Munich. He teaches and researches in the field of GPS/Galileo, pseudolites, inertial technology, signal processing and navigation. He previously was a project manager at Kayser-Threde GmbH, Munich, in mission analysis and satellite navigation. His research is now on software receivers, indoor positioning and deep GPS/INS integration. He represents Germany in the Galileo signal task force.
Marco Falcone	is System Engineering Manager of the Galileo Project Office in Noordwijk, European Space Agency (The Netherlands). He holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy and a Master’s Degree in Space Systems Engineering from the University of Delft, The Netherlands. His main task is to define the Galileo requirements and interfaces at system level and to ensure that the Galileo system fulfills the required navigation and integrity performance objectives.
Jörg Hahn, Ph.D.	received his M.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics from the Belorussian State University, Minsk in 1993 and his Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from the University FAF Munich in 1999. After being with DLR’s Oberpfaffenhofen navigation group for almost 8 years he joined in April 2000 ESA’s Galileo Project Office in Noordwijk as a navigation system engineer. He is now primarily in charge of all Galileo End-to-End Performance.
Christopher J. Hegarty, D.Sc.	has been involved with aviation applications of GPS at MITRE’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development since 1992. He is Chair of RTCA’s Program Management Committee, co-chair of RTCA SC-159 (GPS), and President of the ION. He was a recipient of the 1998 ION Early Achievement Award, 2005 ION Johannes Kepler Award, 2005 U.S. State Department Superior Honor Award, and 2006 Worcester Polytechnic Institute Hobart Newell Award. He is NavtechGPS' GPS Modernization Technical Advisor.
Günter W. Hein, Ph.D.	is Full Professor and Director of the Institute of Geodesy and Navigation at the University of Federal Armed Forces, Munich. His major areas of research are in precise GPS navigation, GPS/INS integration and Galileo. He is a member of the European Commission’s Galileo Signal Task Force. Dr. Hein received the ION’s prestigious Johannes Kepler Award in 2002.
Stephen Heppe, D.Sc.	recently retired as VP and Chief Scientist for Insitu, Inc, specializing in miniature robotic aircraft. He currently operates the consulting firm Telenergy, Inc. His experience in satellite and terrestrial communications spans VHF to optical systems. He has been involved in GPS and DGPS systems since 1985. He holds several patents for GPS receiver design and differential GPS, and is NavtechGPS' Technical Advisor for DGPS & Communications Links.
Martin Hollreiser, Ph.D.	works for the ESA Galileo Project heading the User and Ground Receiver Section. Previously he led the Microelectronics Section in the ESTEC Technical Directorate. Since 1983 his R&D activities have focused on integrated CDMA transceiver design, GPS/GLONASS and Galileo receiver design and VLSI payload signal processing for satellite communications systems. He holds a Ph.D. degree in E.E.and was visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, PA. Dr. Hollreiser is a Sr Member of the IEEE and a member of the ION.
Patrick Hwang, Ph.D.	is a Principal Systems Engineer with the Advanced Technology Center of Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He has over 25 years experience in applied Kalman filtering and advanced navigation systems design and holds various system technology patents. Recently, he has been developing concepts for indoor navigation, for highly-accurate time transfer systems and for aircraft novel integrity-optimized RAIM algorithms. Dr. Hwang is a past winner of Engineer of The Year and Inventor of The Year awards at Rockwell Collins. He has authored or co-authored many technical papers on GPS and Kalman filtering applications and co-authored the textbook Introduction to Random Signals and Applied Kalman Filtering, 3rd edition with Prof. R. Grover Brown of Iowa State University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Iowa State University.
Hans Kunze	has been involved with GPS and GNSS technology and its applications for over 20 years, and is heading up KLA Global, a product marketing firm. He follows trends in international, military and commercial markets. He previously held positions in project management at the GPS JPO, and in product marketing, international business development and general management at various GPS manufacturers. He has presented at numerous seminars and conferences such as ION, World ITS Congress, PTTI, and IGS.
Gérard Lachapelle, Ph.D.	holds the CRC/iCORE Chair in Wireless Location in the Dept. of Geomatics, the U. of Calgary, where he is responsible for teaching and research in the area of wireless location, positioning and navigation, with emphasis on GPS. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Johannes Kepler award in 1997 and Fellowship of the Institute of Navigation in 2003. Dr. Lachapelle is NavtechGPS' Technical Board Member for High Sensitivity GPS.
Demetrios Matsakis, Ph.D.	has worked on how time scales are generated, how clocks are steered, Cs atomic fountains, Hg-based trapped-ion clocks, pulsars, VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry), CEI (Connected Element Interferometry), atmospheric modeling, water vapor radiometers, maser amplifiers, and molecular radio astronomy. He studied under Dr. Charles Townes at UC Berkeley. He is President of the International Astronomical Union’s Commission on Time. He has published over 100 papers, and teaches in a private capacity.
Robert Nelson, Ph.D.	is President of Satellite Engineering Research Corporation, a consulting firm in Bethesda, Maryland. He holds a Ph.D in physics from the University of Maryland. Dr. Nelson is co-author of the textbook Satellite Communication Systems Engineering (Prentice Hall, 1993) and is Technical Editor of Via Satellite magazine. He is a member of IEEE, AIAA, APS, AAPT, AAS, IAU, and ION.
Frederick Niles	holds a Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Southern California and his Master’s degree in Control Theory from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He currently works at MITRE/CAASD in the Navigation department on WAAS, LAAS and GPS L5 issues. He is in charge of the Linux port of the OpenSource GPS software and has contributed various other improvements to the code.
Mark Petovello, Ph.D.	is assistant professor in the. Dept. of Geomatics Eng., Univ. of Calgary. Since 1998, he has been involved in research including software-based GNSS receivers, satellite-based nav, inertial nav, reliability analysis, and dead-reckoning sensor integration. He has extensive experience in nav algorithm development, and is co-creator of GPS/GLONASS and GPS/INS software packages.
Alan J. Pue, Ph.D.	is a Principal Staff Member in the Air Defense Systems Department at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Since 1974 he has worked on a variety of guidance, control, and navigation projects including automated ground vehicle control, space telescope point control, missile guidance and control, and GPS-aided inertial navigation systems. He has worked on development of tightly-coupled, high anti-jam, GPS/INS systems for the Navy and the development of missile defense system concepts. Currently, he is the Director of the Interceptors Knowledge Center for the Missile Defense Agency.
Logan Scott	Consultant, specializes in RF, signal processing and protocol design for navigation, cellular, radar, and emitter location systems. He pioneered approaches for building jam-resistant digital receivers at Texas Instruments and has developed fast acquisition architectures, IMU integration approaches, and adaptive array techniques. He holds 29 US patents. He is NavtechGPS’ Technical Advisor for New Signals & Processing.
James Sennott, Ph.D.	is President of Tracking & Imaging Systems, a GPS software and hardware development company. His expertise includes estimation theory, spread-spectrum communications, software design and microprocessor architectures. He directs development of receiver technology and simulations for civil embedded GPS and network-aided tracking systems, and is principal investigator of US Navy and Air Force Integrated Demodulation/Navigation receiver dev. projects. He holds 4 patents in the GPS receiver area.
Trent Skidmore, Ph.D.	is a Senior Research Engineer and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Ohio University Avionics Engineering Center. His research is currently focused on differential GPS-based aircraft precision approach and landing applications, including JPALS and LAAS. Dr. Skidmore has been involved in standards development at the FAA, RTCA, and ICAO.
Susan Skone, Ph.D.	is Associate Professor in Geomatics Engineering at the Univ. of Calgary. She has a background in space physics and has conducted research in modeling ionospheric and tropospheric effects on GPS. She has developed software for atmospheric research, and has chaired international working groups on remote sensing of the atmosphere using GNSS. She leads the GPS payload component for the CanX-2 nanosatellite mission.
Michael Vaujin	is the lead navigation engineer for Guided Projectiles at Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson, Arizona. He received his BSEE from the University of Florida in 1987 and his MSEE degree from the University of South Florida in 1991. During his subsequent 16 years at Honeywell Aerospace he was awarded 3 patents and developed and taught an in-house technical course on inertial navigation error equations. In 2004 he accepted a position at Tracking & Imaging Systems, Inc. in St. Petersburg, FL and developed Matlab™ versions of all strapdown navigation and Kalman filtering software used in support of a test range tracking application. This software included an 81-state Kalman filter used for the covariance analysis of the navigation errors under various maneuvers and environmental conditions. In his current work with Raytheon he continues to teach and provide navigation support for several land combat systems.
Frank van Diggelen, Ph.D.	is Technical Director of GPS Systems, and Chief Navigation Officer, at Broadcom Corporation; prior to that he was at Global Locate which was bought by Broadcom. At Global Locate he created the Worldwide Reference Network for A-GPS, Coarse-time Navigation, and many other nav. innovations. He holds over forty issued patents on A-GPS. He was a senior engineer at Navsys; & GPS/Wireless marketing director at Magellan. He has published over fifty articles, taught six different GPS courses, and is NavtechGPS' Technical Advisor for Assisted GPS.
Frank van Graas, Ph.D.	is Russ Professor of Electrical Engineering and a Principal Investigator with the Avionics Engineering Center at Ohio University. He has been involved with GPS research since 1984, including the first real-time GPS attitude and heading flight experiment on a DC-3, and the first code-phase Differential GPS system to satisfy both sensor accuracy and Total System Error requirements for Category IIIb automatic landing operations using a Boeing 757. The first prototype Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) for Category III was completed by his research team in 1997 and successfully flight tested by the FAA. Dr. van Graas has received several awards for his research, including the 1996 Johannes Kepler Award for "Sustained and Significant Contributions to Satellite Navigation" from the Satellite Division of the U.S. Institute of Navigation. Dr. van Graas is also a Visiting Professor at Leeds University in the United Kingdom and Immediate Past President of the U.S. ION.
Durk van Willigen, Ph.D.	is founder and president of Reelektronika BV, a Dutch high-tech radio-navigation and radar company. From 1989 till 2000 Prof. van Willigen headed a radio navigation research group at Delft University. He received the Medal of Merit of the International Loran Association, the Thurlow Award of the Institute of Navigation, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of Navigation. He is a Fellow of the RIN and member of the Advisory Board of the Netherlands Institute of Navigation. Prof. van Willigen was instructor at Loran seminars in the US, UK, Norway and Russia.
Phillip W. Ward	is President of Navward GPS Consulting. Previously, at Texas Instruments, he was involved in high performance GPS receiver design since 1976. He received the ION Thurlow Award (1989) for his work in developing the TI 4100, the first commercial GPS receiver. He was President of the ION (1992-93) and Chairman of the ION Satellite Div. (1994-96). He is a Fellow in the ION.
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