Mark Psiaki, professor of aerospace and ocean engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named the Kevin Crofton Faculty Chair of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

The Kevin Crofton Faculty Chair in Aerospace and Ocean Engineering was established with a generous gift from alumnus Kevin Crofton. It supports the recruitment and significant investment into the research program of an internationally recognized scholar. Recipients hold the position for a period of five years.

Psiaki, who has been a tenured professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University since 1993, is a distinguished scholar in the fields of dynamics and control, GPS/GNSS navigation, cyber-physical security with specific expertise in GPS spoofing and jamming, and spacecraft orbit determination and control.

Psiaki is a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation, is an Associate Fellow of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and was the recipient of the 2013 Tycho Brahe Award from the Institute of Navigation. He has published more than 125 journal and conference papers, and has received six Best Paper Awards from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

In 2014 and 2015, Psiaki was a National Research Council senior research associate at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate, and has spent two sabbatical leaves with the aerospace engineering faculty of The Technion in Haifa, Israel, as a Lady Davis fellow.

He is a co-founder of Coherent Navigation Inc., where he worked on iGPS signal processing and Iridium orbit determination.

Psiaki will join Space@VT where he will bring his expertise to research and educational programs in satellite and spacecraft engineering. He will teach courses in astrodynamics, spacecraft control, model-based estimation, and global navigation satellite systems.

Psiaki received his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Share this story