Bradford Parkinson to Discuss ‘GPS for Humanity’

Brad Parkinson

As part of the Stanford Engineering Hero Lecture Series, Brad Parkinson will present a talk on “GPS for Humanity” Monday, April 30, at 7 p.m. Pacific Time. The lecture will be broadcast online at no charge. If you would like to view the live broadcast, register at the Stanford University site.

In large part, Parkinson will present the story he told in GPS World, The Origins of GPS, Part 1 and Part 2. Here is the lecture description:

More than anything else, GPS has become the United States’ gift to humanity. Cell phones rely on GPS for timing. Ship and aircraft carry multiple GPS receivers to provide positioning information. Other applications range from earth movement to disease tracking to search and rescue. Dr. Bradford Parkinson, chief GPS architect and Stanford Professor Emeritus of Aeronautics and Astronautics, will describe the origins and applications of GPS and explore its future, including one application enabled when the world has more than 50 interchangeable civil signals.

Bradford Parkinson is chief architect of the now-ubiquitous Global Positioning System (GPS), which he led as a U.S. Air Force colonel in 1973. As a professor at Stanford, he pioneered GPS for aviation and other applications, including the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) used by the FAA. More recently, he led the NASA/Stanford Gravity Probe B program that validated Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to an unprecedented accuracy. Parkinson is co-editor and an author of the best-selling textbook, Global Positioning System: Theory and Applications.