Bradford Parkinson
Bradford Parkinson (February 16, 1935) is an American engineer and inventor, retired United States Air Force Colonel and Emeritus Professor at Stanford University. He is best known as the lead architect, advocate and developer, with early contributions from Ivan Getting and Roger Easton, of the Air Force NAVSTAR program, better known as Global Positioning System. He was also the co-principal investigator (co-PI) and program manager on Gravity Probe B, which tested gravitomagnetism and was the first direct mechanical test of Einstein’s General Relativity. He has received numerous awards and honors for GPS and contributions to engineering and invention, including the Charles Stark Draper Prize, National Inventors Hall of Fame, and IEEE Medal of Honor, among others. In 2019, Bradford Parkinson shared the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering with three other GPS pioneers (James Spilker, Hugo Freuhauf, and Richard Schwartz). Education For his secondary education, Parkinson attended the Breck School, then a small, all-boys preparatory school, graduating in 1952. Parkinson has credited his experiences at the Breck School for inspiring in him an early love of math and science, an interest which eventually became his life's calling. Parkinson was a distinguished graduate of the United States Naval Academy, graduating in 1957 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. While studying there, Parkinson discovered he had a deep interest in controls engineering, which was introduced in a Senior Level course at the time. Fortunately, one of Parkinson's Electrical Engineering professors was an Air Force officer who urged him to consider being commissioned in the Air Force rather than the Navy. Parkinson also knew he wanted to get a Ph.D. later in life, and the Air Force was more receptive to graduate and post-graduate education at this time. After being commissioned in the Air Force, he was trained in electronics maintenance and supervised large ground radar installations in Washington state. He then was sponsored by USAF to attend MIT, studying controls engineering, inertial guidance, astronautics and electrical engineering. Parkinson worked in the lab of Charles Stark Draper, the namesake for the prestigious Draper Prize which Parkinson went on to win later in his life. At MIT, he received a Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1961 and was elected to the Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi honor Societies. Parkinson was then assigned to work at the Central Inertial Guidance Test Facility at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico. There he developed tests and was a Chief Analyst for the evaluation of the Air Force’s inertial guidance systems and continued work on electrical and controls engineering. In 1964, after three years at Holloman, Parkinson was assigned to a Ph.D. program at Stanford University graduating in 1966, with a degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics. Career Air Force duty After graduating from the Naval Academy, Parkinson opted to perform regular Air Force duty in order to, as he put it, “find out what the Air Force was all about”. He served two years as Chief Communications-Electronics officer at an early warning