Distinguished Engineer
Hometown: Larchwood, IA
Electrical Engineering ,
A. J. Van Dierendonck earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Iowa State University after graduating from South Dakota State College. Van Dierendonck began his career as a control systems engineer before moving into the global positioning system (GPS) field in the mid-1970s. He was owner and founder of AJ Systems, a GPS consulting business in Los Altos, California and was a General Partner of GPS Silicon Valley, a partnership formed in 1991 to develop and market GPS equipment and software. He published numerous papers on GPS topics and has contributed to books on navigation and GPS. He received numerous awards from the Institute of Navigation (ION), received the Burka Award twice (for best journal paper of the years 1993 and 2002), the Kepler Award (for sustained and significant contributions to satellite navigation), the Thurlow Award (for outstanding contributions to the science of navigation) and he was an ION Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. In 2000, he was named to the U.S. Air Force GPS Hall of Fame.