James Spilker
James Julius Spilker Jr. (August 4, 1933 – September 24, 2019) was an American engineer and a consulting professor in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at Stanford University. He was one of the principal architects of the Global Positioning System (GPS). He was a co-founder of the space communications company Stanford Telecommunications, and was most recently executive chairman of AOSense Inc., Sunnyvale, CA. Education After graduating high school and working for awhile, Spilker began attending college at the College of Marin, a community college in Kentfield, California, primarily for financial reasons. Upon receiving scholarship aid from Stanford University and Hewlett-Packard, he was able to transfer to Stanford, which he attended for 5 years and received a B.S. degree in 1955, an M.S. degree in 1956, and a Ph.D. in 1958, all in Electrical Engineering. He also completed the Senior Management Program at UCLA in 1985. Career From 1958 to 1963, Spilker worked as a research supervisor at Lockheed Research Labs in Palo Alto, California, where he invented an optimal tracking device for spread-spectrum signals and devised technology to communicate with aircraft flying to/from Berlin when Russia blockaded Berlin. In 1963 he became manager of the Communications Sciences Department of Ford