Mark Psiaki
Mark Psiaki is the Kevin T. Crofton Faculty Chair in Aerospace & Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he has taught since 2016, and he is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, where he taught for 30 years. He spent two sabbatical leaves as a Lady Davis Visiting Associate Professor with the Aerospace Engineering Faculty at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and one sabbatical leave as an NRC Senior Research Associate at the Space Vehicles Directorate of the AFRL in Albuquerque, NM. His contributions lie in the areas of estimation, filtering, data fusion, and signal detection with applications to GPS/GNSS navigation, alternative navigation methods, spacecraft attitude and orbit determination, and remote sensing of the upper atmosphere. He has authored or co-authored more than 80 refereed journal articles, 75 additional conference papers and trade magazine articles, 1 book chapter, and 10 U.S. patents. He is a Fellow of both the Institute of Navigation (ION) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He has received the ION’s Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and Burka awards, the Technion’s Meir Hanin International Memorial Prize, and 6 best paper awards for AIAA conferences. Mark Psiaki earned a B.A. in Physics (1979), an M.A. in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (1984), and a Ph.D. in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (1987), all from Princeton University.
Richard L. Reaser, Jr.
Richard L. (Rick) Reaser, Jr., has been a self-employed, independent consultant since January 2020. He provides independent consulting services to U.S.-CREST on Global Positioning System (GPS) and general space technology and markets. In the Spring of 2021, he provided independent consulting services Cerberus Operations and Advisory Company in the performance of technical and market due diligence to assess the viability of an aviation innovation. He provided independent consulting services to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through the Aerospace Corporation with a systems engineering program assessment of the Artemis program in Spring 2020. From 2006 to 2019, Mr. Reaser led Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems’ Spectrum Management and Electromagnetic Environmental Effects Department. He was an Air Force Officer from 1978 to 2006 when he retired as a Colonel. While in the Air Force, Reaser served in the Air Force’s GPS Joint Program Office (JPO) twelve years across three duty tours as a satellite engineer, satellite contract manager, chief engineer, and deputy system program director. While serving as the Defense Department’s deputy director of spectrum management, he was detailed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense to the White House and the State Department as a technical advisor to the US Ambassador to the World Radiocommunications Conference (WRC). In the late 1990’s he was selected as U.S. spokesperson and leader of the interagency effort to prevent GPS spectrum encroachment. He helped the US and Europe obtain new international spectrum for GPS and Galileo at two World Radio Conferences (2000 and 2003). He negotiated the technical agreement between the Europe Union (EU) and the United States to share spectrum between the two systems in 2004. He led the design efforts for three new GPS civil signals L1C, L2C and L5 as well the new military signal called M-Code. Mr. Reaser was appointed by the Secretary of Commerce in January 2009 to the Commerce Spectrum Management Federal Advisory Committee as a Special Government Employee where he served for a decade. In 2015 he was selected by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to serve on a Congressionally-directed committee that provided scientific, technical and management recommendations regarding Commerce Department’s telecom labs.
Jeffrey H. Reed
Professor. Jeffrey H. Reed is the Willis G. Worcester Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. He currently serves as Founding Director of Wireless@Virginia Tech, one of the largest and most comprehensive university wireless research groups in the US, which he founded in 2006. In 2010, he founded the Ted and Karyn Hume Center for National Security and Technology and served as its interim director. From 2019-2020 he served as the interim director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, and is the current CTO. Dr. Reed’s area of expertise is in software radios, smart antennas, wireless networks, and communications signal processing. He has received his Ph.D., M.S., and B.S., all in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from the University of California, Davis (respectively 1987, 1980, and 1979). He has participated in various National Academies activities, including the GAO Broadband Study in 2016, the Engineering Review and Report on Telecommunications research in 2015, and the Engineering Review and Report on the Communications Technology Laboratory of the Department of Commerce in 2015, as well as serving on the technical advisory boards for approximately six companies and as an informal advisor on national policy regarding wireless issues.
Nambirajan Seshadri
Nambi Seshadri’s pioneering research and commercial intuitiveness have impacted multiple generations of mobile and wireless communications and have helped make technology more affordable for consumers. While at AT&T Shannon Labs, one of Seshadri’s key research initiatives was his work on transmission and coding techniques using multiple transmit antennas. This helped create a new field of wireless communications called space-time coding that improved the reliability of data transmission. An earlier version of this work that he did at AT&T Bell Labs, called delay diversity, was an important component of the 2G cellular time-division multiple access systems and has also impacted WiFi and LTE systems. His contributions to reliable transmission of compressed speech over mobile radio channels also influenced the development of 2G cellular systems. He also drove the adoption of adaptive modulation and hybrid automatic repeat request techniques (important for high performance in time varying channels) in to the Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution (EDGE) standards. These techniques have become core to robust transmission in 3G and 4G systems around the world. His work on list Viterbi decoding and applications for combined speech and channel decoding as well as data transmission systems have been applied to improve speech quality in 2G and 3G systems. Following his career at AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Shannon Labs, Seshadri helped build Broadcom into a significant player in the wireless market. Here, he initiated or nurtured projects such as short-range wireless, WiFi modems in phones, cellular modems, GPS, near-field communications, and the multimedia chip set strategy that resulted in pioneering products such as the high-definition video camcorder and advanced megapixel camera phones. Through his leadership, the company was able to reduce prices while improving the performance of wireless chipsets. This system-on-chip integration of applications processing, graphics, haptics, WiFi, Bluetooth, camera, and 2G/3G/4G modems has impacted the industry by making smart phones much more affordable. An IEEE Fellow and member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Seshadri is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego, San Diego, CA and consulting CTO at Quantenna Communications, San Jose, CA, USA, in addition to serving as an advisor for several startups.
J. Scott Stadler
J. Scott Stadler is the Head of the Communication Systems mission at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He directs a portfolio of programs spanning architecture definition, technology development, system prototypes, and testbeds that are advancing the capabilities of the nation’s communication networks. The Division focuses on military satellite communications, free-space laser communications, ground and air based tactical radios, spectrum operations, and the development of quantum technologies for communications. He has been involved in the design, development, and operation of a number of NASA and DoD satellite systems both at Lincoln Laboratory and in industry. This work included the early design and prototype of an architecture for supporting packetized network services via satellite. He has also led research efforts focused on the seamless integration of wireless and terrestrial packet data networks. He has served in a variety of technical management positions at Lincoln Laboratory and also served as Chief Engineer for the AF SMC/MCX through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act and as a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Stadler holds a BS degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an MS degree from the University of Southern California, and a PhD degree from the University of Pennsylvania, all in electrical engineering.
Stephen J. Stafford
Stephen J. Stafford is the Chief Scientist of the GPS & GNSS Group at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL). He is a member of JHUAPL’s Principal Professional Staff, holding B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively. He has over 15 years of experience in PNT sensor fusion, and radio-navigation. This includes the development of several GPS receivers for high-accuracy and weak signal applications. He has several publications related to the field of navigation warfare.
Jon Eisenberg - (Staff Officer)