Canadian Wins Prestigious ION Parkinson Award
GoGeomatics is pleased to publish the news that Simon Banville, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering on the University of New Brunswick Fredericton campus, has won this year’s Institute of Navigation Bradford W. Parkinson Award. It was presented during The Institute of Navigation’s GNSS+ meeting in Tampa, Florida, this week.
The Parkinson Award recognizes an outstanding graduate student in the field of global navigation satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System. The winner is selected based on the theses and dissertations submitted by supervisors from the global GNSS research community. In determining the awardee, a selection committee looks for outstanding contributions that represent truly significant innovations in the technology, application, or policy of modern satellite navigation systems.
The award honours Dr. Brad Parkinson for his leadership in establishing both the U.S. Global Positioning System and the Satellite Division of the ION.
Mr. Banville received the award for his dissertation entitled Improved Convergence for GNSS Precise Point Positioning. He was supervised by Prof. Richard Langley.
Precise Point Positioning or PPP is a relatively new single-receiver positioning technique that uses precise information on the orbits of navigation satellites and the atomic clocks they carry in a rigorous mathematical model for analyzing receiver measurements. It permits positioning accuracies down to the few-centimetre level and Mr. Banville’s improvements to the technique will have significant economic benefits for those using GNSS in high-precision applications.
Mr. Banville will receive his Ph.D. degree at UNB’s Fall Convocation next month.
