Thomas Yunck

Long-time NASA technical manager and researcher; pioneered the use of GPS for civil and scientific applications; past chairman of the Foundation for Earth Science; inductee into the Space Foundation’s Space Technology Hall of Fame. In 1988, Tom wrote the first proposal for exploiting GPS signals to sound the Earth’s atmosphere for weather and climate applications. Since then he has been involved in every aspect of its development and validation. He holds the basic patent on the state space approach to Wide Area Differential GPS positioning, which has grown into a $100M/year industry and received a BSEE from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Yale University.