Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership
Information on the Award
The Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership is presented annually and recognizes significant achievements in service to, or leadership in, the geodesy community by a mid-career or senior scientist. This award is named in honor of past AGU Fellow and AGU Smith medalist, Ivan I. Mueller, for his contributions to international programs that advanced geodesy over the past 50 years.
The Mueller Award encompasses all areas of geodesy, including exceptional performance in fieldwork; the development and maintenance of major software systems; leadership in scientific initiatives, education, and public outreach; as well as other service and leadership achievements. This award is presented during the AGU Fall Meeting.
Award Benefits
AGU is proud to recognize our section honorees. Recipients of the Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership will receive the following benefits with the honor:
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Award plaque
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Recognition in Eos
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Recognition at the AGU Fall Meeting during the award presentation year
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Complimentary ticket to the Geodesy section event that occurs at the AGU Fall Meeting during the award presentation year
Eligibility
To better understand eligibility for nominators, supporters and committee members, review AGU’s Honors Conflict of Interest Policy.
Nominee Eligibility
- The nominee is required to be an active AGU member.
- The nominee must be primarily or secondarily affiliated with the Geodesy section.
- The following individuals are not eligible to be candidates for the award during their terms of service:
- AGU President;
- AGU President-elect;
- Council Leadership Team members;
- Honors and Recognition Committee members;
- Geodesy Award Committee members; and
- All full-time AGU staff.
Nominator Eligibility
- Nominators are not required to hold an active AGU membership.
- The following individuals are not eligible to be nominators for the award during their terms of service:
- AGU President;
- AGU President-elect;
- Council Leadership Team members;
- Honors and Recognition Committee members;
- Geodesy Award Committee members; and
- All full-time AGU staff.
Supporter Eligibility
- Individuals who write letters of support for the nominee are not required to be active AGU members.
- The following individuals are not eligible to be supporters for the award during their terms of service:
- AGU President;
- AGU President-elect;
- Council Leadership Team members;
- Honors and Recognition Committee members;
- Geodesy Award Committee members; and
- All full-time AGU staff.
Relationships to a Nominee
The following relationships need to be identified and communicated to the Award Committee but will not disqualify individuals from participating in the nomination or committee review process. These apply to committee members, nominators, and supporters:
- Current dean, departmental chair, supervisor, supervisee, laboratory director, an individual with whom one has a current business or financial relationship (e.g., business partner, employer, employee);
- Research collaborator or co-author within the last three years; and/or
- An individual working at the same institution or having accepted a position at the same institution.
Individuals with the following relationships are disqualified from participating in the award nomination process as a nominator or supporter:
- Family member, spouse, or partner.
- A previous graduate (Master’s or Ph.D.) and/or postdoctoral advisor, or postdoctoral fellow may not write a nomination letter but may write a supporting letter after five years of terminating their relationship with the nominee beginning on 1 January after the year the relationship was terminated.
- A former doctoral or graduate student, or a former postdoctoral fellow may not write a nomination letter for a former advisor but may write a supporting letter after five years of terminating their relationship with the nominee beginning on 1 January after the year the relationship was terminated.
Nomination Package
Your nomination package must contain the following files, which should be no more than two pages in length per document. Watch our tutorial on successfully submitting a nomination package or read our guide
- A nomination letter that states how the nominee meets the selection criteria. It should include details outlining the nominee’s significant contributions to geodesy. Nominator’s signature, name, title, institution, and contact information are required and letterhead is preferred.
- A curriculum vitae for the nominee.
- A selected bibliography stating the total number, the types of publications and the number published by AGU.
- At least two, and up to three, additional letters of support. Supporter’s signature, name, title, institution, and contact information are required and letterhead is preferred. We encourage letters from individuals not currently or recently associated with the candidate’s institution of graduate education or employment.
Submission Process
Submissions are reviewed by the Geodesy Award Committee. Nominations should be submitted online.
Recipients
Paul Rebischung
Harald Schuh
Frank Michael Flechtner
Frank Flechtner received the Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2019, held 9–13 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award acknowledges “major achievements in service to and/or leadership within the field of geodesy.”
Citation
It is a privilege and a distinct pleasure to write this citation for Frank Flechtner, winner of the 2019 Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership.
Throughout his distinguished career, Frank has personified the spirit of the Mueller Award. Even with his first project in 1988, the German Precise Range and Range-Rate Equipment (PRARE) satellite tracking system, he had a remarkable end-to-end impact, spanning deployment fieldwork, development of the master control segment, the processing and archiving facility, satellite altimetric software development, and user training and education workshops. In the 2000s, Frank was among the dedicated group working on a series of space missions during the very successful Decade of Geopotential Field Research. He served as project manager for the German gravity and magnetics mission Challenging Minisatellite Payload (CHAMP), and took responsibility for major Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) subsystems and its mission operations and the science data system in Germany. Since 2009, he served as the co–principal investigator for the GRACE mission. From this time until the end of the GRACE mission in 2017, he ensured the continued operation of the GRACE extended mission by marshalling resources for continued ground operations and science data analysis in the German mission segments. Since 2010, Frank has been instrumental in making possible the GRACE Follow-On mission, with GFZ in the lead role for managing the German contributions to this joint U.S./German space mission. His unflagging efforts for advocacy and promotion of the mission among the sponsors were key to ensuring continuity of geodetic measurements of the global mass change.
Frank’s selfless commitment to geodesy is evident from how he has nurtured the growth of his research group at GFZ and led its collaborations worldwide in space missions, instrument development, and applied sciences research. Frank has displayed exemplary leadership of numerous research and development initiatives, promotion of scientific conferences and sessions, and mentorship of students and scientists at the Technical University of Berlin and GFZ.
—Srinivas Bettadpur, Center for Space Research, University of Texas at Austin
Response
I am honored and proud to receive the 2019 Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership. Thanks, Srinivas, for your wonderful citation, and everyone involved in this nomination, especially Byron Tapley and Chris Reigber, the principal investigator and initial co–principal investigator of GRACE, for always being inspiring role models for me.
Since I started working on the GRACE project in 1998, unbelievable progress has been made analyzing and applying mass transport data. Although the “E” in GRACE Follow-On still stands for “Experiment,” operational services such as the U.S. Drought Monitor meanwhile rely on the integration of total water storage data (besides other observations). In Europe, the Horizon 2020 program has recently funded a project to develop a Global Gravity-based Groundwater Product, which is managed by my institute and significantly based on GRACE/GRACE-FO mission data.
The accuracy of monthly mass transport data could be continuously improved by the joint U.S./German Science Data System since 2002 throughout several reprocessings. In parallel, the new International Combination Service for Time-variable Gravity Field Solutions (COST-G) under the umbrella of the International Association of Geodesy’s International Gravity Field Service will provide consolidated monthly global gravity models by combining solutions or normal equations from various international analysis centers, a service well known from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) or International GNSS Service (IGS). Both will further help using gravity mission data for numerous applications in such Earth system sciences as hydrology, oceanography, glaciology, or geophysics.
I am grateful that I could support the development and operation of this unique measurement system within my career, which brought me scientific inspiration and many new friends. I am proud to be part of the GRACE family! Last but not least, I would like to thank all my colleagues in the United States and Germany who supported me on this path, as well as my family for their endless patience and support throughout these years.
—Frank Flechtner, Helmholtz Centre Potsdam – GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam
Richard S Gross
Richard Gross will receive the 2018 Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2018, to be held 10–14 December in Washington, D. C. The award acknowledges “major achievements in service to and/or leadership within the field of geodesy.”
Citation
It is my great pleasure to write this citation for Richard Gross, winner of the 2018 Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership in recognition of his outstanding and tireless service in our geodesy community. Richard is an extraordinary geodesist, a respected leader who has been promoting geodesy within AGU and other international scientific organizations over the past ~30 years.
Richard earned his academic reputation for researches on Earth rotation, reference frames, and the time-variable gravity field. But I believe Richard should also be viewed as a respected leader. For several decades, Richard has been among the most visible leaders of many globally well known geodesy organizations. He has been serving as the chair of the Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS) Science Panel since 2006; chair of the IERS Global Geophysical Fluids Center, Special Bureau for the Oceans, since 1998; president of International Association of Geodesy (IAG) Commission 3, Earth Rotation and Geodynamics, from 2011 to 2015; and president of International Astronomical Union (IAU) Commission A2, Rotation of the Earth, from 2015 to present. His achievements are enviable, and he fully deserves recognition for this.
Richard has been deeply committed to the service of AGU and other geodesy communities and has worked diligently on many productive activities that have significantly promoted geodesy. Richard has generously given his time organizing geodesy conferences and workshops. For many years, Richard has been chairing two geodetic sessions, “Earth and Planetary Rotation” and “The Global Geodetic Observing System,” at AGU Fall Meetings.
Based in Pasadena, Calif., Richard regularly travels cross the Atlantic and leads or participates in scientific conferences in Europe. He will certainly continue to remain engaged in the leadership and service activities for our geodesy community.
—Veronique Dehant, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels
Response
It is a great honor to receive the Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership from the Geodesy section of AGU, and I thank everyone involved in this nomination, especially Veronique Dehant and Yuning Fu. Ivan Mueller greatly contributed to the growth of international geodesy, and it is especially rewarding to receive an award bearing his name.
I have been fortunate during my career to have had the opportunity to work in many different areas of geodesy, from Earth rotation, to time-variable gravity, to terrestrial reference frame determination. Throughout this journey, I have benefited from the advice of many mentors and colleagues, but especially from my Ph.D. thesis advisor, Martin Smith; from Martin’s first Ph.D. student, John Wahr; and most recently from my friend and colleague Zuheir Altamimi. Friends and colleagues like these are what make working in geodesy such a pleasure.
There is a long history of international cooperation in geodesy, from early determinations of the figure of the Earth to current space–geodetic measurement systems. This tradition of cooperation and friendly competition has been essential to advancing geodetic practice and to gaining greater understanding of the geodetic properties of the Earth. It also makes it a pleasure to represent the community of geodesists to international organizations like the Group on Earth Observations and the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites. Geodesy may be one of the smaller scientific disciplines, but our reach is broad, our community is congenial, and it has been a privilege to be part of it during the past 3 decades.
—Richard Gross, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Ken W Hudnut
Kenneth Hudnut will receive the 2017 Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership at the 2017 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, to be held 11–15 December in New Orleans, La. The award acknowledges “major achievements in service to and/or leadership within the field of geodesy.”
Citation
“Ken Hudnut has been a leading model of scientific leadership and public service for almost 3 decades. His pioneering use of high-precision GPS techniques has contributed to the understanding of seismic fault structures and behavior. He played an important leadership role in the design of the modernized GPS L1C signal, which will improve the worldwide services provided by GPS to billions of users. Finally, his work with the U.S. Geological Survey continues to contribute to the management and reduction of risks arising from earthquakes and other national hazards, to the benefit of the public.”
– Dr. Scott Pace, Executive Secretary of the National Space Council
Ken dedicated much of his research career to serving the geodetic community, often working at the highest levels behind the scenes, to ensure that researchers and society would benefit from geodesy. Through Ken’s vision and leadership, we learned that it was possible to install a continuous GPS network (SCIGN) dedicated to understanding tectonic processes and how airborne lidar could characterize tectonic deformation B4 and after an earthquake. Ken has become the bridge between the Earth science and emergency response communities, communicating hard science to decision makers and educating the public with ShakeOut earthquake drills. In 2016, 28 regions and more than 55 million people participated worldwide.
Ken’s most significant contribution to science and society will be realized with the launch of the Block III GPS satellites. Ken co-led the design of the GPS L1C signal. The L1C signal will be stronger and more ionosphere resistant with improved accuracy in challenging environments and will enable low-power phase positioning on small devices. When the L1C begins broadcasting, the global community, including 6.1 billion smartphone users, will appreciate the improved GPS experience, but few will realize that our AGU Geodesy section colleague Ken Hudnut is the one to thank.
—Dr. Gerald Bawden, NASA, USA
Response
I thank the AGU Geodesy section, especially President Susan Owen and President-elect Meghan Miller, and particularly Gerald Bawden and others who supported this nomination, for the honor of being selected for this year’s Ivan I. Mueller Award. I never expected such recognition and am humbled, especially by Scott Pace’s kind words. I owe thanks to many more colleagues and friends than I can mention.
First, I thank my grandmother, Olive W. Smith, Ph.D. (biochemist), who encouraged my scientific curiosity. Later, Dick Stoiber taught me about volcanoes and Jim Savage showed me how to use geodesy to study them, and earthquake-related deformation. John Beavan, Kerry Sieh, Will Prescott, Nano Seeber, Tom Rockwell, and Mike Bevis guided and worked with me to explore new ways to mix geodesy, geology, GPS, and imagery to study the San Andreas Fault system. Earthquakes also inspired me; the significant earthquakes of 1987, 1992, 1994, 1999, and 2010 each helped identify how we needed to keep improving our observations before future big events. Over the years, with Hiroo Kanamori, Don Helmberger, Tom Heaton, and Joann Stock and their talented students and postdocs, we imagined how improved observations could answer questions concerning fault rupture and how it relates to ground motions, displacements, permanent deformation, and transient effects. Recently, pushing lidar’s limits with Ben Brooks and Craig Glennie has been exciting.
At the U.S. Geological Survey, leaders allowed me free rein to pursue collaborative projects. It is gratifying that Scott and Gerald mentioned notable examples of teamwork with SCIGN, B4 lidar, the GPS L1C signal, scenarios, and risk reduction. This award promotes teamwork that, in turn, fuels the innovative thinking needed to answer big scientific questions that remain.
Finally, I thank Dana Coyle and our children, Alexa, Olivia, and Brock, for their love and support.
—Kenneth Hudnut, U.S. Geological Survey, Pasadena, Calif.
Eric Jameson Fielding
Eric Jameson Fielding will receive the 2016 Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership at the 2016 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, to be held 12–16 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes “major achievements in service and/or leadership to the geodesy community.”
Citation
It is a great pleasure to write this citation for Eric Fielding, who is this year’s winner of the Ivan I. Mueller Award. The Ivan I. Mueller Award was established in 2013 to recognize major achievements in service and/or leadership to the geodesy community that go above and beyond scientific and research contributions.
Eric is a world-leading geodesist and geophysicist who has pioneered and enabled the use of interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) as a mainstream tool for tectonics. Teasing out small deformation signals from large collections of raw radar data is not straightforward. Eric has patiently and generously used his deep understanding of radar processing to mentor and support a large number of scientists, allowing them to make advances in InSAR techniques or in their application. A dozen or more of these are now well-established researchers or university professors. Eric has been one of the main users and supporters of the InSAR software tools developed at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, which have been the principle processing packages used by the scientific community, fixing bugs and ensuring updated versions are released to community. Since 2008, he has been teaching an annual InSAR short course, hosted by UNAVCO, which has now been taken by several hundred participants. It is not an exaggeration to say that without Eric’s selfless support many of the scientific advances that have relied on InSAR observations would not have been possible.
Eric’s unselfish mentoring provides a model for future geoscientists, especially for those who work with new technologies; he has provided, promoted, and supported rapid dissemination of space observing techniques and software to the broad benefit of our community; his work is geodetic but also benefits the seismology, tectonophysics, and volcanology sections of the AGU. I can think of no more deserving winner than Eric for this year’s award.
—Tim J. Wright, University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K.
Response
I would like to thank the American Geophysical Union Geodesy section and those involved in this nomination, especially Tim Wright, for the great honor of being selected for this year’s Ivan I. Mueller Award. I am happy to be the first Mueller awardee working in the field of interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR). I was fortunate to start working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), operated by California Institute of Technology, when InSAR was starting to be applied to geodetic and geophysical problems, including wide-area mapping of topography and surface deformation.
I have greatly benefited from the close collaboration between radar engineers and geophysicists at JPL and Caltech that allowed us and other collaborators around the world to extend InSAR and related methods to study many solid Earth processes. Paul Rosen leads the InSAR software development at JPL, releasing both the Repeat Orbit Interferometry package (ROI_pac) and InSAR Scientific Computing Environment (ISCE), and he and Scott Hensley always helped me understand the theory and implementation. Gilles Peltzer, Mark Simons, Matt Pritchard, Rowena Lohman, Paul Lundgren, Piyush Agram, Eric Gurrola, Walter Szeliga, and many others have collaborated on improving the system for getting the InSAR results, converting to geophysical measurements, and modeling the processes. UNAVCO has generously sponsored InSAR short courses for the past 8 years, with Scott Baker providing excellent help.
I started radar imaging of the Earth with Art Bloom at Cornell University, and learned about geophysics and earthquakes from Bryan Isacks and Muawia Barazangi. Their teaching helped me to join the early InSAR community, and Bryan and Muawia also encouraged me to create a prototype system for sharing geophysical results. The open collaboration of faculty, students, and researchers at Cornell University inspired my later efforts in spreading InSAR in geodesy. I am grateful to my wife for her encouragement.
—Eric Jameson Fielding, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Charles M Meertens
Charles Meertens will receive the 2015 Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership at the 2015 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, to be held 14–18 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes “major achievements in service and/or leadership to the geodesy community.”
Citation
For the last 3 decades, Chuck Meertens has served the geodesy community through his work and leadership in UNAVCO, a consortium of research institutions (universities) that assists investigators with space geodetic (using Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and other techniques for Earth science research). Chuck is one of a handful of leaders who have helped lead the geodesy community into an exciting new era that has employed technological advances to open vast new areas of research in the Earth sciences. He was at UNAVCO in its infancy, and he helped build up this important community institution from the ground up. It’s fair to say that Chuck has contributed, in one way or another, to virtually every area of geodesy, from the development of strain and tiltmeters to gravity observations, GPS field data collection, instrumentation development, data analysis, archiving, and education and outreach. Indeed, it is hard to find people in the field who Chuck has not helped—he is involved in field campaigns, data analysis research, and development of new instrumentation, and he freely gives his time to a variety of professional organizations and executive boards. Chuck has helped hundreds of scientists over the years, most often very anonymously and with little credit to himself. Chuck is always a team player and willing to jump into any challenge to find a solution that is beneficial to the community. And to top it off, he’s just a delightful guy—full of energy, enthusiasm, unshakeable optimism, and generosity. It would be difficult to imagine anyone more deserving of this award.
—R. Steven Nerem, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder
Response
I would like to thank the American Geophysical Union Geodesy section and those involved in this nomination for the great honor of being selected for this year’s Ivan I. Mueller Award. Art Sylvester, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, first introduced me to the fascinating notion of using geodetic techniques to directly measure active geologic processes. Chris Harrison and Judah Levine, at the University of Colorado Boulder, taught me the beauty in making sensitive geodetic instruments capable of recording the smallest motions of the Earth.
Sometimes opportunity intersects with interests, and I was fortunate to ride with the first wave of scientists using new “portable” GPS instruments to study what has proved to be nearly boundless sets of geophysical problems. It has been very rewarding to contribute to what my International GNSS Service colleague Chris Rizos calls the “beginnings of a geodetic renaissance.” I owe a debt of gratitude to Stick Ware and Chris Rocken for providing me the chance to explore GPS technology at UNAVCO and to Bob Smith at the University of Utah for the opportunity to team up to make the first GPS measurements at Yellowstone.
Ultimately, my interests and activities tended toward understanding and providing infrastructure needed to support a broad user community. In this pursuit I have been privileged to work with a talented and creative group of technologists, scientists, and educators who desire to make the best geodetic measurements possible, tackle tough scientific and societal problems, and share data and knowledge. Ivan Mueller embodies these collective goals, and I am deeply appreciative of receiving this award that honors him. I am also humbled, as this recognition extends to my many colleagues who share in this vision of infrastructure and community for collaboration. I am grateful to Meghan Miller for enabling this vision, to my UNAVCO colleagues who make it happen, and to my friends and family for their unwavering support and inspiration.
—Charles Meertens, UNAVCO, Boulder, Colo.
Carine Bruyninx
Carine Bruyninx received the 2014 Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership at the 2014 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, held 15-19 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes “major achievements in service and/or leadership to the geodesy community.”
Citation
The Ivan I. Mueller Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership recognizes major achievements in service to and leadership of the geodesy community that go beyond scientific and research contributions. Inspired by the role model of Ivan I. Mueller, an AGU Fellow and Waldo E. Smith Medalist, the award is intended to recognize a body of work that enhances the visibility of geodesy within AGU as well as within the international associated bodies.
We are honored to be invited to write the citation for this year’s recipient of the award, our distinguished colleague Carine Bruyninx of the Royal Observatory of Belgium. Carine was chosen by the international geodetic community to take on the role of network coordinator of the Reference Frame Sub-Commission for Europe (EUREF) Permanent Network (EPN) in 1996. She is broadly recognized for her vision in transforming Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) networks for scientific applications. Today, she continues her tireless and skillful service as head of the EPN Central Bureau. By employing rigorous scientific principles, Carine has shown the world how one can develop and actively stimulate the use of common guidelines in a GNSS network involving more than 30 countries. In large part owing to Carine’s efforts, the EPN became a shining example for other networks to follow, and a preeminent pillar in the International GNSS Service (IGS), which has its roots in the vision and leadership of Ivan I. Mueller. The community recognizes Carine’s dedicated service to geodesy through her appointment to the IGS Governing Board, and to other leadership roles within the International Association of Geodesy.
To quote one of the supporting letters, “Dr. Bruyninx has played a major role in enabling and promoting the GNSS transformation. In so doing, she has exemplified par excellence all the qualities of leadership and service that the Mueller Award is intended to recognize.”
—Geoff Blewitt, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada;
—Véronique Dehant, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium; and
—ZUheir Altamimi, Institut Géographique National, Paris, France
Response
Thank you for your kind words. I am extremely honored to receive this award and would like to thank all of those involved in the process.
After finishing my studies in astrophysics at the University of Leuven, faith drove me in the direction of GPS when I was hired at the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB) to “integrate Belgium in international terrestrial reference frames.” We installed permanent GPS stations and integrated one of them in the International GPS (now Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)) Service (IGS). I started to attend the meetings of the International Association of Geodesy subcommission for the European Reference frame (EUREF), and when EUREF decided to set up a regional densification of the IGS, I was asked, at the end of 1995, to become the network coordinator. Without fully realizing the consequences, I answered positively. Since that time, my team and I have been responsible for the daily management of the EUREF Permanent Network (EPN). This position has given me the opportunity to interact with a lot of colleagues, to learn from them, and to have interesting discussions on how to upgrade the EPN in response to evolving technological developments, such as real-time data streaming, multi-GNSS, and individual antenna calibrations while maintaining reliable station metadata (my battle horse for many years).
I am fortunate to have worked with numerous colleagues over the years. I would like especially to thank the former director of ROB, Professor P. Pâquet, my mentor in the early years, who will always have my full respect. The discussions with the members of the EUREF Technical Working Group, with whom I’ve worked closely together for 2 decades, were constructive and challenging. Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues within the GNSS research group at ROB: we complement each other, and it is a joy every day again to work with each of you.
—Carine Bruyninx, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels
Robert W King
Robert W. King was selected during the inaugural year to receive the 2013 Ivan I. Mueller Award for Service and Leadership at the 2013 AGU Fall Meeting, held 9–13 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes “major achievements in service and/or leadership to the geodesy community.”
Citation
The Ivan I. Mueller Award recognizes major achievements in the field of geodesy, especially in the areas of leadership and service. The award, named for Ivan Mueller of Ohio State University, recognizes the extraordinary importance of international collaboration within the field of modern satellite geodesy. It exemplifies AGU’s motto of unselfish cooperation in research. The Mueller Award was given for the first time in 2013, and the committee hoped to have an outstanding candidate for the inaugural year, setting a high bar for future nominations. The awards committee tells me that Bob made their decision easy—he was the unanimous choice.
Although he has made numerous scientific contributions throughout his career, Bob is now known by thousands of scientists for his role in the development and support of the open-source GPS Analysis at MIT (GAMIT) software. This sophisticated analysis tool is now used by more than 400 institutions around the world to study motions of the solid Earth, estimate changes in tropospheric water vapor, investigate Earth rotation, and measure ice sheet dynamics, to name just a few. Many scientists owe their careers to Bob’s unstinting support for this software and the help he has so generously offered.
To quote one of the supporting letters, “few members of the AGU Geodesy section have worked so hard, so long, or so selflessly as has Bob King on behalf of the geodetic and the broader Earth science community.”
—MATT KING, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Response
Thank you, Matt. I am honored to receive an award named for someone who has not only been an inspiration to me throughout my career but whose critical role in the formation of the International GPS (now GNSS) Service (IGS) has made possible both my own research and my ability to assist others in the art of GPS data analysis.
None of my work would have been possible without the efforts of colleagues in the development of the GAMIT/GLOBK software. The foundational codes were developed while Sergei Goureviitch, Yehuda Bock, Rick Abbot, and I were a part of Chuck Counselman’s group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tom Jordan and Rob Reilinger encouraged us to make the software freely available to our research partners and, later, researchers worldwide. Tom Herring took the data processing to a new level by writing code to do automatic data editing of phase data and modifying the very long baseline interferometry program GLOBK to combine GPS data sessions. Peng Fang simplified the installation, and Simon McClusky wrote the scripts to facilitate automatic processing.
Important contributions have also been made by Danan Dong, Mark Murray, Kurt Feigl, Peter Morgan, Burkhard Schaffrin, Shimon Wdowinski, Seiichi Shimada, Paul Tregoning, Chris Watson, Mike Moore, Liz Petrie, and Mike Floyd, many of whom have also conducted training workshops for other users. Some of the key models have been adapted from the Bernese and GNSS-Inferred Positioning System (GIPSY) software, whose authors have generously made them available for use by the IGS community.
Having the opportunity to work with these fine collaborators as well as GAMIT users from many cultures and disciplines has been the most rewarding part of my career.
—ROBERT W. KING, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
Honors Contacts
