2026 Fellow

Presented to: Dr. Jason Rife

Citation: For significant contributions to error modeling and fault mitigation to support safety-of-life navigation

Dr. Jason Rife is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tufts University. He directs the Automated Systems and Robotics Laboratory (ASAR), which applies theory and experiment to characterize the integrity of autonomous vehicle navigation.

Dr. Rife’s current work focuses on self-driving cars, where LIDAR has emerged as a vital sensor for navigation. Defining the integrity of LIDAR-based positioning is a new challenge. In this research, Dr. Rife has worked with the US Department of Transportation to develop methods for position inference, error modeling, and fault mitigation for LIDAR-based positioning of ground vehicles. He innovated new approaches for defining integrity and resilience requirements for roadway applications.

Dr. Rife has made fundamental contributions to advance the field of safety-critical navigation for GNSS-based aviation. His work on rigorous bounding of position-error distributions (or overbounding) has supported safety cases for several systems designed for civil aviation, including the Ground Based Augmentation System (GBAS) and the Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS). His 2006 paper on paired overbounding, as well as his other papers on overbounding methods, continue to be influential and are frequently cited.

Dr. Rife is ION’s current Executive Vice President. He has held numerous Council and Satellite Division offices, as well as serving as General Chair and Program Chair of ION’s International Technical Meeting (ITM) and ION GNSS+ meetings. He is a longstanding associate editor for NAVIGATION, The Journal of the Institute of Navigation. He received his MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.