2004 Early Achievement Award

Presented to: Dr. Sherman Lo

Citation: For his pioneering work on the modernization of LORAN and its use as a high-integrity backup to GNSS navigation for aviation users.

Dr. Sherman Lo is currently a research associate at the Stanford University Global Positioning System (GPS) Laboratory. He is the associate investigator for Stanford University’s efforts on the Department of Transportation’s technical evaluation of Loran. In this role, he has helped to coordinate and organize the evaluation team and chairs several of the technical working groups. He is also active on the technical analysis of many major hazards as well as the overall systems engineering and integrity analysis. He is a co-author of the Loran technical evaluation completed in 2004. The report was provided to the DOT for use in their decision on the mix of federally provided radionavigation systems.

Based in part on the work of Dr. Lo, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration instituted a research program to determine the degree to which a modernized version of Loran could serve as a backup means of navigation (not just transmission of DGPS corrections). To support this effort, Dr. Lo and several colleagues founded the Loran Integrity and Performance Panel (or LORIPP). The LORIPP group coordinated several technical projects aimed at evaluating the feasibility of modernized Loran to support the integrity requirements of aviation non-precision approach (NPA) in the absence of GNSS. Dr. Lo led the LORIPP subgroup focusing on Loran skywave and groundwave propagation issues and he performed the hazard analysis that quantified the degree to which propagation uncertainties affect user integrity for the NPA application. He also combined these results with the results of others to estimate the overall accuracy/integrity/continuity/availability for modernized LORAN in support of NPA users. He was one of the primary authors of the resulting Loran technical evaluation report and he has taken the lead in presenting and publicizing the results of this study in many different venues, including multiple ION meetings as well as Loran association meetings and European GNSS meetings.

Dr. Lo has a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering, a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Maryland, and a M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics; a M.S. in Engineering Economics and Operations Research; and a PhD. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Stanford University.