2017 Weems Award

Presented to: Prof. Allison Kealy

Citation: For sustained contributions to advancing the art and science of navigation, and promoting and expanding the use of PNT among worldwide science and engineering communities.

Kealy-Allison

Prof. Allison Kealy has provided international, interdisciplinary and inter-organizational leadership to the collaborative efforts of the worldwide science and engineering community. She has been involved in creating open resources for researchers, and in establishing strong collaborations between international scientific organizations.

Prof. Kealy’s multi-disciplinary sponsored research ranges from applications of PNT to environmental sensing, resilient information systems, natural disaster response, road safety, urban transportation and location based systems. Her PhD work established preliminary algorithms for in-car navigation systems based around integrating GPS and Dead Reckoning with Map Matching – work she has significantly furthered over the past two decades. She continues to be an academic leader in the areas of high performance GNSS applications, GNSS quality control, sensor fusion and estimation theory.

Prof. Kealy has held leadership roles within the International Association of Geodesy (IAG), International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) and ION where she has emphasized the role of PNT in ITS, disaster management, and recently, on cooperative navigation in several areas of application (pedestrians, vehicles, UAVs). She is frequently involved in organizing technical meetings such as ITS World Congress, the International GNSS Symposium (which she has chaired four times), the International Mobile Mapping Symposium and ION GNSS+. Prof. Kealy serves as vice-president of the IAG Commission 4 on “Positioning and Application”. She has served ION in numerous capacities, most recently as ION GNSS+ Peer Review Co-chair (2016 and 2017) and is currently a Technical Representative on ION Council.

Prof. Kealy is a professor in geospatial science at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She holds a PhD in satellite navigation from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and a BSc in land surveying from the University of the West Indies, Trinidad. She has published more than 50 papers and graduated more than ten PhD students.