KAIST professor becomes 1st Korean to win Thurlow Award
Lee Ji-yun, an endowed chair professor in the aerospace engineering department at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), has become the first Korean researcher to receive the Colonel Thomas L. Thurlow Award from the U.S. Institute of Navigation (ION), the university said Sunday.
On Jan. 25 (local time), the U.S. institute announced that it selected the KAIST professor as the Thurlow Award recipient in recognition of her achievements in the field of satellite navigation. This is the first time a Korean researcher has won this award, and there has been no previous instance of a Korean or a person of Korean descent receiving this honor.
The Thurlow Award was established in 1945 to honor Colonel Thomas L. Thurlow, who made significant contributions to the development of navigation equipment and the training of navigators. The award is given annually to an individual who has made a landmark contribution to the advancement of navigation.
Past recipients include Charles Stark Draper, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology known as the father of inertial navigation, who developed the guidance navigation computer for the Apollo moon landing project.
ION said the professor made a significant contribution to ensuring the safety of satellite-based navigation systems for aviation against ionospheric disturbances. The ionosphere is the region of the Earth’s atmosphere from about 60 kilometers up to about 1,000 kilometers above the planet’s surface.
“She developed new ionospheric threat modeling methods, novel ionospheric anomaly monitoring algorithms and mitigation techniques, and efficient system performance evaluation tools for integrity and availability assessment for Ground Based Augmentation Systems (GBAS), while achieving many scientific discoveries in the field of ionospheric research,” ION said. “She is a leading contributor in developing ionospheric anomaly threat models and assessing nominal ionospheric spatial decorrelation in mid-latitude and low-latitude regions for GBAS operations.”
The professor and her research team made a contribution to ensuring the safety of aviation satellite-based navigation systems from ionospheric disturbances that are affected by rapid changes in external factors such as the solar space environment. This technology can be applied to ensure safety of urban air mobility, which will be increasingly used in the near future.
“It’s a great honor and pleasure to receive the Thurlow Award, which has a deep history and tradition in the field of navigation,” Lee said. “I will strive to secure safe and sustainable navigation technologies to contribute to the development of the future mobility industry.”
She developed new ionospheric threat modeling methods, novel ionospheric anomaly monitoring algorithms and mitigation techniques.